Image of Edessa
The "Holy Mandylion" disappeared again after the Sassanians conquered Edessa in 609. A local legend, related to historian Andrew Palmer when he visited Urfa (Edessa) in 1999, relates that the towel or burial cloth ("mendil") of Jesus was thrown into a well in what is today the city's Great Mosque. The Christian tradition exemplified in Georgios Kedrenos' "Historiarum compendium" is at variance with this, John Scylitzes recounting how in 944, when the city was besieged by John Kourkouas, it was exchanged for a group of Muslim prisoners. At that time the Image of Edessa was taken to Constantinople where it was received amidst great celebration by emperor Romanos I Lekapenos, who deposited it in the Theotokos of the Pharos chapel in the Great Palace of Constantinople. Not inconsequentially, the earliest known Byzantine icon of the Mandylion or Holy Face, preserved at Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt, is dated c. 945.