From Latvia to Scotland, more than 200 goblets in Europe alone have been posited as being the holy relic. This, of course, is not the first time that the Holy Grail has been “found.” For while the Holy Grail has proven elusive, it is also strangely ubiquitous. READ MORE: Were Crusader Knights Really Protecting the Cup of Christ? Since the book’s publication last week, the basilica has been inundated with visitors, forcing curators to remove the relic from display until they can find a larger exhibition space to accommodate the crowds. “The only chalice that could be considered the chalice of Christ is that which made the journey to Cairo and then from Cairo to León-and that is this chalice,” Torres told the newspaper. As the Irish Times reports, the co-authors concede they cannot definitively prove that the chalice actually touched Jesus’s lips, only that it is the vessel that early Christians revered as the one used at the Last Supper. The co-authors report that scientific dating has placed the origin of the cup between 200 B.C. Torres and del Rio say the upper half is made of agate and missing a fragment, exactly as described in the Egyptian parchments. The chalice, made of gold and onyx and sprinkled with precious stones, is actually two goblets fused together, one turned up, the other down. The goblet has been in the basilica’s possession since the 11th century and in plain sight in the church’s basement museum since the 1950s. The emir then gifted the chalice as a peace offering to the Christian King Ferdinand. The researchers had been investigating Islamic remains in the Basilica of San Isidoro when they came across medieval Egyptian parchments that mentioned that the holy chalice had been taken from Jerusalem to Cairo and then given to an emir who ruled an Islamic kingdom on Spain’s Mediterranean coast in return for the help he gave to famine-stricken Egypt. The historians say that a three-year investigation led to their conclusion that the hallowed cup that Jesus Christ supposedly drank from at the Last Supper and that was used to collect his precious blood is a jewel-encrusted goblet that has long been known as the chalice of the Infanta Doña Urraca in honor of the daughter of King Ferdinand I, ruler of León and Castile from 1037 to 1065. In their newly published book Los Reyes del Grial (“The Kings of the Grail”), medieval history lecturer Margarita Torres and art historian José Miguel Ortega del Rio claim the Holy Grail rests inside the Basilica of San Isidoro in the northern Spanish city of León.
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