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Venetians should stop reading
at this point. What I am going to say may cause offence.
In 391,
encouraged by the Patriarch Theophilus, Christian monks ran amok in
Alexandria, destroying all the pagan temples. The most sacred pagan relic
in town was the body of Alexander the Great, and, according to Andrew
Chugg, In The Lost Tomb of
Alexander the Great,
(2004) the pagan priests may have come up with a cunning plan to save it. They
could have substituted
the body of Alexander for that of St Mark, knowing that the thuggish
monks would then respect it. Thus the body stolen over four hundred
years later, and which supposedly still lies beneath the high altar in the
Basilica, is in fact the Pagan Alexander. Oh dear.
If you don't like the idea, don't worry, not everyone accepts this
theory. iI
fact very few seem to, and
it is certainly not a popular one in Venice.
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