Overview

In a central part of Turn Cathedral is an elaborate, baroque shrine housing one of the Catholic Church's most precious and controversial artifacts: a 15-foot-long piece of cloth known as the Turn Shroud. Its surface bears, in faint shades of brown, the unmistakable image of a man. For its dedicated believers, known as the "Shroudies," this image is that of Jesus Christ himself, burnt onto the cloth upon his miraculous resurrection image from the dead. But the debate over the shroud's origins has raged furiously since its first documented appearance in Lirey, France, in the 1350s.