An international team of researchers has succeeded in identifying and analyzing dozens of medieval graffiti in one of Christianity’s holiest sites, the Cenacle of Jerusalem, the place where tradition says the Last Supper took place.
At the top of Mount Zion in Jerusalem stands a site of extraordinary religious significance for the three major monotheistic religions. While Jews and Muslims venerate this space as the tomb of King David, Christian tradition consecrates it as the place where Jesus held the Last Supper with his disciples.
This space, known as the Coenaculum, was built by the Crusaders and has attracted pilgrims from around the world for centuries. Today, thanks to an international collaboration led by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), new historical traces have been revealed on its walls.
Through the use of advanced digital techniques such as multispectral photography and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), the research team has made inscriptions, heraldic shields, and drawings visible that had until now remained hidden to the naked eye. The findings, compiled in a study published in the prestigious journal Liber Annuus, allow for a more accurate understanding of the profile of the pilgrims who visited Jerusalem between the 13th and 15th centuries.
One of the most interesting discoveries from the Austrian perspective is the identification of a shield belonging to the noble family of Tristram von Teuffenbach, originally from the Murau region in Styria. This heraldic figure was carved into the wall of the Cenacle, probably during the pilgrimage of 1436, when Archduke Frederick of Habsburg — the future emperor of the Holy Roman Empire — traveled to the Holy Land accompanied by a large entourage of one hundred Austrian nobles. The connection between this emblem and the region of origin was made possible by the long-term research project Corpus Vitrearum, promoted by the ÖAW, which studies the history of stained glass since the Middle Ages.
The repertoire of inscriptions, however, is not limited to the Germanic world. Among the most revealing is an Armenian epigraphy dated to Christmas of the year 1300, a detail that reinforces the hypothesis that King Het’um II of Armenia and his troops reached Jerusalem after the victory won at the Battle of Wādī al-Khaznadār in Syria in December 1299. The elevated location of this inscription, characteristic of Armenian nobles, adds credibility to this theory, long debated by historians.
Equally significant is the discovery of an Arabic inscription that reads …ya al-Ḥalabīya. Researchers deduce, based on the double feminine ending in the language, that it would be the trace of a Christian female pilgrim from Aleppo, Syria. This detail, exceptional in the epigraphic record of the time, constitutes rare evidence of the participation of women in premodern pilgrimages.
The walls of the Coenaculum also reveal names and symbols of other notable figures of the period, such as Johannes Poloner, from Regensburg, who documented his journey to Jerusalem in 1421–22. A charcoal drawing has also been located bearing the shield of the influential patrician family von Rümlingen, originally from Bern. Taken together, the documented graffiti offer a plural portrait of the geographic composition of the pilgrims: in addition to Austria, Germany, and Armenia, there are traces from Serbia, Bohemia, and Arabic-speaking Christian communities of the Levant.
Ilya Berkovich, a researcher at the ÖAW and co-author of the study, emphasizes that these graffiti allow us to see with new eyes the geographic diversity and complexity of medieval pilgrimage to Jerusalem, breaking with the exclusively Western approach that has dominated studies until now.
The documentation and analysis work has been the result of extensive collaboration among academic institutions in Austria, Israel, and Armenia. The inscriptions, many of which were barely visible, were digitally processed in the laboratory of the Leon Levy Digital Library of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In total, some 40 epigraphic elements have been identified, including five heraldic shields, forming an unprecedented corpus for understanding this sacred site as a point of convergence of cultures, faiths, and personal trajectories in the Middle Ages.
SOURCES
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW) Shai Halevi, Ilya Berkovich, Michael Chernin, Samvel Grigoryan, Arsen Harutyunyan, ‚The Holy Compound on Mount Sion – An Epigraphic Heraldic Corpus (Part 1): The Walls of the Cenacle‘, Liber Annuus 74 (2024), S. 331–74
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