Dedication of the Church of the Resurrection (Anastasis) in Jerusalem

Golgotha buried and recovered

The places of the Lord's Crucifixion and Resurrection lay just outside the walls of first-century Jerusalem, in a disused quarry holding a garden and rock-cut tombs (John 19:41–42). After the destruction of the city under Titus in 70 and the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem from about 135 as the pagan colony Aelia Capitolina, and the site of the Tomb was buried under an earth platform carrying a temple precinct — the tradition, reported by Eusebius and Jerome, names a shrine of Venus (Aphrodite) over the Tomb and Golgotha. The Christians of Aelia kept the memory of the place through the two centuries of its burial; that continuous local memory is the thread on which the whole later history hangs.

After the Council of Nicaea (325), Constantine — moved, Eusebius says, by divine prompting, and encouraged by bishop Macarius I of Jerusalem — ordered the pagan platform demolished, the soil carried away, and the holy places laid bare. Against expectation the rock-cut Tomb emerged intact. The emperor wrote to Macarius (the letter is preserved in Eusebius's Life of Constantine) commanding a basilica to be raised there surpassing every church in the world, and charging the governors of the eastern provinces to supply whatever the work required.

Helena and the finding of the Cross

The empress Helena, Constantine's mother, journeyed to Palestine around 326–328, already about eighty years old, endowed the excavation and building works, and founded basilicas at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives. The tradition of the Church — attested from the later fourth century by Cyril of Jerusalem's letters and catecheses (which speak of the Wood of the Cross found in Jerusalem under Constantine), then in narrative form by Ambrose, Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret — relates that in the excavations beside Golgotha three crosses were found, with the nails and the title; and that the Lord's Cross was distinguished when, at the counsel of Macarius, its touch healed a dying woman (later accounts add the raising of a dead man). Helena took part of the Cross to Constantinople, and the greater part remained in Jerusalem in a silver reliquary in the bishop's keeping — where the pilgrim Egeria saw it venerated on Great Friday half a century later. Eusebius's silence about the Cross is the chief critical difficulty in the tradition; the Church's calendars celebrate the finding without resolving the historical question (see the Elevation of the Cross, September 14, where it is treated at length).

The Constantinian complex

The buildings that arose between about 326 and 335 formed a single processional complex along the city's main colonnaded street. From the east one entered through a propylaea into an atrium; then the Martyrium (Μαρτύριον, "the witness"), the great five-aisled congregational basilica; then an open colonnaded court, the Triportico, with the rock of Golgotha standing in its south-east corner; and at the west the Tomb itself, which the masons had cut free from the surrounding rock so that it stood as a freestanding aedicule. Around the Tomb rose the Anastasis (Ἀνάστασις, "Resurrection"), the great rotunda whose form — a domed cylinder ringed by columns — was echoed for a thousand years in baptisteries and sepulchral churches across Christendom; the rotunda in its monumental form appears to have been completed in the years after the dedication of the basilica. Eusebius describes the gilded coffered ceiling of the Martyrium, its polished stone, and the "new Jerusalem" built facing the old — consciously answering the ruined Temple across the valley.

The dedication of 335 and the Encaenia

Constantine appointed the dedication for the thirtieth year of his reign (his tricennalia). The bishops assembled at the council of Tyre in the summer of 335 were commanded to proceed to Jerusalem, where they were joined by hierarchs from every province of the East — Eusebius, an eyewitness, lists Macedonia, Pannonia, Bithynia, Thrace, Cilicia, Cappadocia, Syria, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Arabia, Palestine, and Egypt, with a bishop from Persia — and the church was consecrated with a splendour, he says, beyond anything since the apostles. The date, 13 September 335, is fixed by the later liturgical tradition of Jerusalem; scholars have long observed that it displaced, or answered, both the anniversary of the dedication of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome and — in the reckoning of the Jerusalem church itself — stood as the new counterpart of Solomon's dedication of the Temple at the feast of Tabernacles. The Byzantine synaxaria draw exactly this parallel: "the new Israel, fulfilling the old law, honours Thy Tomb with Encaenia, O Word."

The anniversary became a fixed feast of the Jerusalem church — the Encaenia (τὰ Ἐγκαίνια, "the renewal" or "dedication"), in Slavonic usage the Obnovlenie ("Renewal") of the church of the Resurrection. The pilgrim Egeria, who kept the feast in Jerusalem in the early 380s, describes it as ranking with Pascha and Epiphany: it was kept for eight days, the churches were adorned as at Pascha, the city filled with monks from Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and the Thebaid and with bishops — forty or fifty, she says, when the pilgrims counted — and no one thought himself excused from the solemnity. She notes expressly that the day was kept the more gloriously because the Cross of the Lord had been found on the same day, and that on the feast's days the Cross was brought out and venerated. The fifth-century Armenian lectionary of Jerusalem confirms the structure: the Encaenia on 13 September, and on its second day, 14 September, the showing (elevation) of the precious Cross to all the people. As the veneration of the Cross spread through the whole East, the second day eclipsed the first: the Elevation became a universal Great Feast, and the Dedication remained as its eve — which is why the Byzantine calendar to this day keeps on September 13 the Encaenia together with the forefeast of the Elevation.

The later fortunes of the church

The Constantinian complex stood for almost seven centuries, damaged and repaired through the Persian sack of 614 (when the Cross itself was carried off to Persia and returned by Heraclius in 630) and the Arab conquest of 638. In 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered its systematic demolition; the Martyrium basilica was never rebuilt. The Byzantine restoration under Constantine IX Monomachos (completed 1048) and the Crusader rebuilding (dedicated 1149) produced the present Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in which the rotunda of the Anastasis, on its Constantinian foundations and enclosing the aedicule of the Tomb, still shelters the same rock. The feast of the Dedication has been kept without interruption; at the church itself the Jerusalem Patriarchate celebrates the Encaenia annually on this day.

The feast in Russian usage

In the Russian tradition the day is popularly called Voskresenie Slovushchee — approximately "the [day] called Resurrection" — because it bears the name of the Resurrection without being Pascha. Churches dedicated to the Resurrection of the Word (rather than to Pascha itself, to which no church is dedicated) kept this day as their patronal feast, and on it the divine services may be celebrated with paschal hymns; Moscow alone had many such "Slovushchee" churches, and the custom remains alive.