San Thome Basilica
— — a white spire above the apostle's tomb.
Not only on a wall.
“A Neo-Gothic basilica on the Coromandel coast of southern India, built over the tomb of the Apostle Thomas. The Portuguese raised the first church on the site in 1523; the British rebuilt it in white stone in 1893. One of only three churches in the world standing above the grave of an apostle, the others in Rome and Santiago de Compostela. The spire is visible from Marina Beach, half a kilometre east.
San Thome Basilica, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
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The place, in three passes.
San Thome Basilica stands in the Mylapore neighbourhood of Chennai, on India's southeastern Coromandel coast in Tamil Nadu, about half a kilometre inland from Marina Beach. Christian tradition holds that the Apostle Thomas reached the Malabar coast in AD 52 and was martyred at nearby St Thomas Mount in AD 72, and that his remains were buried on the site that the basilica now covers. Pope Pius XII raised the church to the rank of Minor Basilica in 1956, and Pope John Paul II visited in 1986.
The current building is the third on the site. Portuguese missionaries put up a small church in 1523, which was enlarged into a cathedral later in the 16th century. The British East India Company government demolished the older fabric in the late 19th century, and the present Neo-Gothic basilica was completed in 1893 in white-painted stone with a single soaring spire roughly 47 metres tall. The underground crypt holds the small chapel and tomb-shrine, accessible by a stair behind the main altar.
The basilica is open every day for prayer and for visitors, free of charge, with hours that bracket morning and evening Mass. A small on-site museum exhibits relics, archaeological finds from the earlier churches, and a fragment of bone traditionally identified as the apostle's. The neighbourhood of Mylapore is one of the oldest in Chennai and surrounds the basilica with temples, including the 16th-century Kapaleeshwarar Temple, a five-minute walk inland.