The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (15 page)

Her prayer was answered. The Holy House flitted away as quickly as it had appeared, and it reappeared moments later in a meadow outside Laureta’s grove which belonged to two brothers. There the pilgrims could approach the sacred structure on open ground, and the thieves could not come close to them without being seen. So many people flocked to the Holy House with offerings that the small building was soon piled high with gifts. The two brothers who now owned the shrine looked at their newfound wealth, and they looked at each other; and they licked their lips, and rubbed their hands, and laughed.

But it was not long before they laughed a little less, and rubbed their hands a little less, and looked at each other sideways. It was not long before they started to suspect each other of filching gifts from the shrine. And it was not long before the two brothers, who had once loved each other, began fighting; and as they fought over the gifts it had brought them, the Holy House flitted away once more.

It reappeared moments later on a nearby hill. There, only the most devoted could reach it. There guards could guard it; and there it stayed. The guards and the priests lashed the Holy House to the ground with ropes and pegs so that it would not flit away again, and they built a wall around it so that no one could steal its treasures.

Everyone knew the house was holy, but they had no idea where it had come from or what it was. Then, a couple of years later, a hermit came to the authorities with a dream. The Blessed Virgin had appeared to him, he told them, and revealed to him the true nature of the Holy House and the source of its flitting. The authorities passed the information to their masters, and they to theirs, until eventually it reached the ears of Pope Boniface, who—not being the type to believe such stories too readily—gathered some sixteen men of credit to verify the tale.

He gave them the measurements of the Holy House as he had been told them, and sent them on a journey to the place from which the building had supposedly flitted. The pope’s emissaries crossed
the Adriatic Sea and arrived at the Croatian port of Fiume. They were directed up to the fortress above the town, and there they were introduced to an old priest, Father Alexander Georgevich, who told them his story.

1291

O
NCE UPON A
time, there were some shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. The angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, “Fear not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.” But the shepherds were still sore afraid, and they ran back to the fortress, which was called Tersatto.

The next day the shepherds went out again into the fields. In place of the heavenly host, they found a little house sitting on the grass. But the shepherds did not dare to enter the building, and they returned to the fortress a second time.

The third time they brought the castle guard and old Father Georgevich out into the fields with them. They helped him down the hill, since at his age his limbs were painful and stiff, and now they ventured into the little building. The bare walls were streaked with grease and soot, under which could be discerned graffiti in a language that not even learned Father Georgevich could understand. At the east end of the house, mounted on a high table, stood an image of a little baby in his mother’s arms.

The shepherds and the guards and old Father Georgevich left the shrine, and Father Georgevich hobbled home to pray to Our Lady for guidance. He fell asleep at his kneeler. The Virgin Mary appeared to him and told him all about the Holy House, and then she said: “In order that you may bear testimony of all these things, be healed. Your unexpected and sudden recovery shall confirm the truth of what I have declared to you.” Father Georgevich sprung up from his kneeler without a twinge of pain, and he did what Our Lady told him to do. He went to the governor of the fortress and told him the story the Virgin Mary had imparted to him.

The governor reported it to his master, the ban of Croatia, who
sent artificers to examine the building. They told him that its dimensions were thirty feet in length and thirteen in breadth; and that the golden stone of which it was constructed was a certain type of limestone, and the sweet smelling timber of its roof was cedar, neither of which was then obtainable in Croatia. Then the ban sent the clerics of his court to their archives, and they told him that such limestone and cedar could be obtained from Palestine alone. They also told him that the dimensions of the house matched those of only one other, in Nazareth, in Palestine, in the Basilica of the Annunciation.

And so the ban sent deputies to distant Nazareth to see this Holy House of which his clerics had spoken. The deputies traveled over sea and mountain, suffering many dangers, until they arrived in Nazareth. The Christian crusaders had only just been expelled from the Holy Land, which was now firmly under the sway of Islam. Churches had been demolished or made over into mosques, and Christians everywhere were converting in droves to the religion of their new rulers. The Croatian deputies found Nazareth desolate and the Basilica of the Annunciation in ruins. They picked their way through the rubble, until at last they found a makeshift shrine on the spot where their guide had told them the Holy House would be. There was one old priest at the door. They went in, and he told them his story.

328

O
NCE UPON A
time, there was an innkeeper’s daughter who married a soldier. Some say it happened in Nicomedia, others in York, but at any rate, her name was Helena, and her son—who also became a soldier—she named Constantine. He became the emperor of Rome, moved its capital to Constantinople, converted his empire to Christianity, and declared himself as the fourth member of the Holy Trinity, joining the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost on his deathbed. And so Helena, whose beginnings were humble, ended up as the mother of a god.

Helena was a Christian at least as enthusiastic as her son, and when he had pacified the eastern parts of his empire she undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Three hundred and twenty-eight years after Jesus
Christ had been born, Helena went to see the places where Jesus, the codivinity with her son, had lived and died and risen again.

Helena traveled all over Palestine, doing good works, endowing churches, and discovering miraculous relics. She founded the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Ascension in Jerusalem. Helena discovered the True Cross, upon which Christ had hung for our sins, hidden in a cistern on Golgotha. In the governor’s palace in Jerusalem she located the staircase down which Pontius Pilate had walked after condemning Jesus to death. Among the ruins on Mount Moriah, Helena had her men excavate columns from the very Temple of Solomon. All of these things she ordered to be labeled, packed, and shipped back to her son in Rome. They are all still there.

Nazareth had always been a small village, and hard to find, but Helena found it. She swept into the hamlet with her imperial entourage and began to seek out the childhood haunts of Our Lord. She found the well from which Mary drew water and the carpentry shop used by Saint Joseph. She also found a little house with just one room, thirteen feet wide and thirty feet long, lit by a single square window high on the western wall. On a shelf of living rock at the east end perched a statue of a mother and child.

“What is this shrine, and what is that image?” demanded Helena. “Is it Cybele or Juno? Or some other pagan idol?”

The attendant of the shrine shrugged his shoulders and told her.

1

O
NCE UPON A
time, in an obscure village, there was a little house. In this house there was but one bare room, about thirty feet long and thirteen feet wide; and in this little room there dwelled a mother and her child. The name of the village was Nazareth. The name of the child, who was a girl, was Mary.

As Mary sat in her house, to her great surprise, an angel flew in through the window on the western wall and spoke to her. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” he said, “the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

“Behold the handmaid of the Lord,” said he.

“Be it unto me according to thy word,” said she.

So in the house the Word was made Flesh and dwelled among us. Many years passed; and Mary’s son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, died, was buried, and rose again, in accordance with the scriptures. So now, when we think of Mary, it is difficult for us to imagine the little girl and her surprise. Instead we say:

Pray for us O Holy Mother of God

That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Pray for us sinners

Now, and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

328

T
HE DOWAGER EMPRESS
Helena, who was herself the mother of a god, knelt in front of the humble image in the lowly shrine and said her Ave Marias. And in order to venerate the holy spot, she commanded that the house should itself be housed: that the sacred vessel that was the house (that had contained the sacred vessel that was Mary that had once contained Our Lord) be placed in a sacred vessel. A small church was built around the little building, and a convent of nuns established to tend the shrine.

1291

A
ND THAT SHRINE
, the old priest told the deputies of the ban of Croatia, was the one in which they now stood. Here was the site of the Holy House, the place where the Word had been made Flesh, the home of Our Lady and Our Lord, the spot blessed by the presence of Saint Helena.

There was nothing there. Helena’s church was gone. The mighty basilica raised in its place by the crusaders was gone. There was only a little shed built over the spot where the Holy House would be; the Holy House itself had disappeared.

And then the old priest told them when it had disappeared. The day upon which the Holy House had flitted away from Nazareth, they realized, was the very day upon which it had appeared at Tersatto. The deputies of the ban of Croatia did not speak, but left Nazareth and went on their way, pondering what they had seen and heard.

1294

T
HE BAN’S DEPUTIES
were glad to be on home shores again, and they were glad to be able to bring good tidings to their master. Their ship docked at Fiume, and they were led up the hill to the fortress of Tersatto. The ban of Croatia met them with a grim face. They began to tell him their news, but he stopped them short. In silence, they were led to the field of the Holy House outside Tersatto. There was nothing there. The Holy House had disappeared.

Then old Father Georgevich told the emissaries of Pope Boniface just when the Holy House had disappeared, and they realized that the night upon which the Holy House had flitted away from Tersatto was the very night upon which it had appeared in the laurel grove over the sea. What’s more, Father Georgevich said that the shepherds who were in the fields that night had seen a multitude of the heavenly host appear in the sky. The angels lifted the house off the ground and bore it away into the darkness. The emissaries of Pope Boniface did not speak, but left Tersatto and went home to tell their master of all the things they had heard.

1631

T
HE PRIEST TOOK
Joseph Chaumonot by the hand, and he led the beggar toward the Holy House of Loreto, encrusted in marble, thronged with pilgrims, shaded by a gigantic dome. They went into it together. There was the small room where Mary had once sat. There was the window through which the angel Gabriel had flown in order to bring the good news to her. The walls were bare, save for the fragments of an ancient fresco. There had been a fire in the Holy House, the priest told the beggar, and the paintings had been damaged by
the flames—except, he pointed out, for those parts that showed the face of Mary. The strange graffiti scratched on the walls, the priest explained, were messages written by the faithful, in Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew and the other languages of the Holy Land, when the Holy House had been at home in Nazareth.

Then the priest walked Joseph Chaumonot around the outside of the Holy House. It was encased in a gorgeous marble reliquary, made, the priest said, at the behest of Pope Julius II by his master artificer Donato Bramante. On its sides, bas-reliefs told the story of the life of Our Lady: her birth, her presentation in the Temple, the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, and the Assumption. There was one scene carved there that Chaumonot did not recognize from the Bible. A battle was taking place as the armies of Muhammad overran the Holy Land. Above the battle there was the Holy House, resting on a cloud that was borne aloft by angels. It was flying over the sea and the land, flitting over mountains to the fortress of Tersatto, and then onward, until at last it came to rest on top of a dark grove of laurel trees. On the steep roof of the little house sat Our Lady and her child, her veil fluttering in the wind. It was all exactly as the priest had said.