Basilica of the Holy Blood

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On the Burg square in Bruges stands a church in two storeys, and the two could hardly be less alike. Below is the chapel of Saint Basil, bare Romanesque stone on heavy pillars, one of the oldest buildings in Flanders and a place made for silence. A wide staircase, worn hollow by centuries of feet, climbs to the upper chapel, Gothic in bones and blazing with nineteenth-century neo-Gothic colour, where the relic is kept: a rock-crystal vial holding a cloth said to be stained with the blood of Christ, wiped from his body by Joseph of Arimathea. Tradition says Count Thierry of Alsace brought it from the Holy Land in 1150; historians point rather to Constantinople after 1204. Either way Bruges has venerated it ever since, raised to the rank of basilica in 1923. The relic is brought out daily for the faithful to pray before and even to touch, and each year on Ascension Day the whole city carries it through the streets in the Procession of the Holy Blood, a pageant older than most nations of Europe.