Dénesi Tamás (szerk.): Collectanea Sancti Martini - A Pannonhalmi Főapátság Gyűjteményeinek Értesítője 5. (Pannonhalma, 2017)
II. Közlemények
100 Dénesi Tamás – Nagy Rebeka – Semsey Réka: Szent Imre palástja According to the mediaeval and early modern inventories of Pannonhalma enu-merating ecclesiastical items, the sacristy and the treasury of the monastery was rich at all times. Such an abundance can only be conceived due to royal donations. The first abbey in Hungary must have received royal gifts of this kind. The invento-ries repeatedly refer to copes, chasubles, viaticums, liturgical cloths and allegedly very old liturgical vestments related to the Hungarian holy kings (in addition to the aforementioned ones, Saint Ladislaus, too), however, it cannot be settles on the ba-sis of the short description of the items, which ones of the riches registered in the Middle Ages got through the Turkish occupation of Hungary. (Owing to the Ottoman Turk conquest, the monastic life was interrupted in the monastery between 1586 and 1639, however, the ecclesiastical accessories were removed to safe places.) It is important to mention that none of the inventories put together between 1535 and 1699 refer to any of the items as of coming from the saints of the Árpád dynasty, and the piece of cloth from Saint Emeric’s robe was introduced into the inventories vary late, in 1786. The question, whether the relic is authentic, cannot be answered on the basis of written documents, or with the help of traditional means of art history. For that very reason, the textile of 8×8 centimetres was taken under close examination. In the course of this it turned out that our relic is neither samit (the most frequent type of weaving structure in the Middle Ages) nor lampas. The method of weaving in this type of textile is proto-lampas displaying a close relationship with the samits, which means – because of the weaving structure – that it might have been made around the first millennium. In order to define the date of its creation more precisely, the radiocarbon dating method was applied, which was conducted in the MTA ATOMKI HEKAL, AMS laboratory in Deb recen in the spring of 2017. On the basis of the exam-ination, the calibrated calendar date of the textile can be estimated between 1454 and 1633, thus according to the examination it seems to be definite that the piece of cloth honoured as a relic was produced after Emeric’s age. It is difficult to answer when the memory of Saint Emeric’s donation was attached to this piece of cloth. The memory of donations was still living among the users of the liturgical vestments in the 17th and 18 th centuries, and that time there might even have been liturgical vestments, which were donated by Stephen, Emeric or Ladis-laus, but it was not exactly known, which ones were those of the old textiles. One or the other of the seemingly old liturgical vestments could easily be related to Saint Stephen’s or Emeric’s name in the period when the cult of the Hungarian saints was rediscovered. When the Order was dissolved in 1786, the majority of the ecclesiastical equip-ment was removed, given away, or sold by auction. After the Order’s reorganization in 1802, only a smaller and less valuable part of the equipment was returned to the monastery. The piece of robe related to Saint Emeric might have been lost during this period of a decade and a half from this ancient monastery.
