Tours ran two streets across St. Martin's church on purpose

TOURS, France, October 2, 1860 AD — For more than eleven hundred years, pilgrims travelled to the grave of Saint Martin of Tours. Kings came there to ask for health or victory. From the 800s AD, pilgrims from Spain even had a road of their own to reach it.

Yet on October 2, 1860 AD, the search for that grave began in a cellar, under a house in Tours.

St. Martin was the bishop of Tours, in France, until he died in 397 AD. He was buried in a burial ground about 530 paces outside the town.

Miracles kept happening at his tomb. Saint Perpetuus, a later bishop of Tours, decided the tiny chapel over the grave was far too small. So he built a great church there, and finished it in 471 AD. It had 52 windows, 120 columns and 8 doors. Charlemagne came to the tomb in 800 AD, just before he was crowned in Rome.

St. Martin’s bones were wrapped in white silk and put inside a jar of alabaster, a smooth white stone. The jar was closed in a box of precious metal. A marble slab covered the tomb. It could be raised, so the box could be lifted out and carried in processions.

Over the centuries the church caught fire many times. In 1230 AD it burned to the ground, and it was rebuilt even bigger. But no fire ever damaged the tomb.

The year the bones were scattered

That changed in 1562 AD. Protestants called Calvinists broke into the church and wrecked it from top to bottom, and they destroyed the tomb. They scattered St. Martin’s bones. Only two relics were saved, an arm-bone and part of his skull. They were carried to the cathedral of Tours. The great pilgrimages from all over France ended that year.

The church was still standing, though. During the French Revolution, in 1793 AD, it was turned into a stable for horses. The rounded end of the church behind the altar was pulled down. In 1797 AD the stone ceilings fell in. After that, the rest was knocked down except two towers.

The town council of Tours made sure the church would never come back. Its plan, drawn up in 1801 AD, ran two new streets right across the church’s site. The streets meant the church could never be rebuilt. People would never again gather there to honour St. Martin.

Small, plain houses went up on the rest of the ground. Over the years most people in Tours came to believe the tomb lay under one of the new streets.

Spades in the cellar

They were wrong. An old plan of the church, drawn in 1802 AD, turned up in a government office in Tours. It showed exactly where the tomb had been: under small houses, not under the road. In 1857 AD Cardinal Morlot bought those houses. They weren’t handed over to him until 1860 AD.

On October 2 that year, a team of searchers started digging in the cellar of one of the houses. The house stood over the spot where the high altar had been. Down in the cellar the diggers found part of the old church’s foundations, just as they had expected. But the tomb wasn’t there. It lay just beyond the cellar wall, under the house next door. The digging had to stop until that house could be bought too.

A small chapel was set up in an upstairs room of the first house. On November 12 the archbishop of Tours said Mass there. It was the first Mass on that spot since the old altar was destroyed seventy years before. For the next seven days, Masses were said there almost without a break. The little chapel and the cellar below it were always full of people.

On the cellar wall, facing the place where the searchers believed the tomb lay, a large red cross was drawn. A small lamp was hung from the ceiling and kept burning there, day and night.