What do Constantine and Robert the Bruce have in common?

And Lord Elgin, to round out the cast. . .
An article in Minerva (summarized in the Times of London) reports how the lid of the giant porphyry sarcophagus, reputedly Constantine's, was brought from Istanbul by Elgin, and eventually ended up recut for Robert the Bruce's monument:

Robert the Bruce. . . was buried in Dunfermline Abbey in 1329; but when the building fell into ruin, the location of his grave was lost. Rediscovered in 1818, the skeleton was found wrapped in cloth of gold, and confirmed as Robert’s by the cloven breastbone, split to remove his heart for burial in the Holy Land.

By the 1870s there was a move to mark the site of the tomb in an appropriate manner, and the ninth Earl of Elgin, as both Lord Lieutenant of Fife and the head of the Bruce family, took the matter in hand. He proposed a memorial flush with the floor of the abbey crossing, so as not to obstruct worship, and offered a huge piece of porphyry which he happened to have at home.

The slab had been at Broomhall, the family seat, since 1802 when it had been shipped from Constantinople by the seventh earl, the noted Lord Elgin who also acquired the Parthenon sculptures now in the British Museum. Elgin had determined to collect some decorative stones to refurbish Broomhall, and as Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, was in a position to ask Sultan Selim III for permission to remove some of the many fragments that had been lying around Constantinople since Byzantine times.

Note that while the Times article states that the (Constantinian) imperial mausoleum was "near the Church of the Holy Apostles", it was in fact inside the church itself.

Posted by David on January 3, 2004 9:25 PM