Construction

A diagram of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre showing traditional site of Calvary and the Tomb of JesusAccording to Eusebius of Caesarea, the Roman emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD built a temple dedicated to the Roman goddess Venus in order to bury the cave in which Jesus had been buried.[5]

HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Sepulchre" \l "cite_note-pringle-6" [6] The first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great, ordered in about 325/326 that the temple be replaced by a church.[7] During the building of the Church, Constantine's mother, Helena, is believed to have rediscovered the "True Cross", and a tomb (although there are some discrepancies among authors).[5] Socrates Scholasticus (born c. 380), in his Ecclesiastical History, gives a full description of the discovery.[8]

Golgotha altar

Constantine's church was built as two connected churches over the two different holy sites, including a great basilica (the Martyrium visited by Egeria in the 380s), an enclosed colonnaded atrium (the Triportico) with the traditional site of Golgotha in one corner, and a rotunda, called the Anastasis ("Resurrection" in Greek), which contained the remains of a rock-cut room that Helena and Macarius identified as the burial site of Jesus.

According to tradition, Constantine arranged for the rockface to be removed from around the tomb, without harming it, in order to isolate the tomb; in the centre of the rotunda is a small building called (in Greek) the Kouvouklion[9] or (in Latin) the Aedicule,[10] which encloses this tomb. The remains are completely enveloped by a marble sheath placed some 500 years before to protect the ledge from Ottoman attacks. However, there are several thick window wells extending through the marble sheath, from the interior to the exterior that are not marble clad. They appear to reveal an underlying limestone rock, which may be part of the original living rock of the tomb.

Each year, the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates the anniversary of the consecration of the Church of the Resurrection (Holy Sepulchre) on 13 September.[11]