Interview with Mechthild Flury-Lemberg

Mechthild Flury-Lemberg began to spin and weave wool shorn from the sheep on her family’s post-World War II German farm at the tender age of 16, “for fun,” she says. She never imagined that the hobby, which led to a career in textile conservation, would also eventually lead her to head the restoration of one of the most cherished and mysterious relics in Christendom — the Shroud of Turin — or that her examination would produce new evidence that the famed linen dates to the first century A.D., to the time of Christ.

Flury-Lemberg studied weaving at an academy in Hamburg, Germany, then earned degrees in the history of art from universities in Kiel and Munich. She then worked for three decades as head of the textile department of the Abegg Foundation in Riggisberg, Switzerland before she retired in 1994 (she came out of retirement for the restoration of the Shroud). During her tenure, she studied and restored a priceless collection of ancient cloths, including the 13th-century grave garments of St. Anthony of Padua and of King Rudolph I of Bohemia, plus 11th-century liturgical vestments, the Tunic of Christ at Treves, and the cowl of St. Francis of Assisi. Ancient textiles like the Shroud of Turin, which, according to belief (if not necessarily scientific evidence) dates to the first century A.D., are quite rare and generally badly preserved. “The textiles handed down to us are normally grave garments, found in burial sites,” she said. “They were wrapped about a dead body and stayed in a chemical climate which forced their oxidation. We rarely find well-preserved linen or silk fabrics.” The Shroud of Turin is so remarkably preserved, she says, because “this cloth was not kept in a tomb. The crucified man was only for some hours wrapped in that linen.”

Other, even older textiles do exist, however, and Flury-Lemberg has worked on many. One of the most unusual was the 2,200-year-old ‘liber linteus,’ a linen book that had been cut into strips and used to wrap the mummy of a Roman girl. “When the mummy came to Zagreb in 1862, scientists discovered Etruscan characters on the bandages but could not decipher the text,” Flury-Lemberg says. “In 1985 I was asked to reconstruct the linen from which the bandages were once taken.” She pieced the strips into their original positions, which allowed the text to be deciphered — and also provided linguists with about 60 percent of the Etruscan vocabulary known today. “It is the fascination of my profession to discover hidden information by staying and ‘talking’ with the object during conservation,” she says. “The same is true for the Shroud of Turin.”

Flury-Lemberg had originally been approached back in the early 1980s to try to date the Shroud by analyzing the structure of the cloth. She refused, “because,” she says, “it is impossible to get a serious result dating a textile by textile analysis alone.” In 1988, the keepers of the Shroud permitted radiocarbon dating of the relic — with unanticipated results. The tests indicated that the cloth had been made sometime between 1260 and 1390 A.D., and thus was a medieval forgery rather than the actual burial shroud of Christ. And yet, when Flury-Lemberg finally did agree to head the restoration and conservation of the linen in the summer of 2002, the Shroud had a far different story to tell her. She first noticed that the entire cloth was crafted with a weave known as a three-to-one herringbone pattern. “This kind of weave was special in antiquity because it denoted an extraordinary quality,” she says. (Less fine linens of the first century would have had a one-to-one herringbone pattern). That same pattern is present on a 12th century illustration that depicts Christ’s funeral cloth, which, she says, is “extremely significant, because it shows that the painter was familiar with Christ’s Shroud and that he recognized the indubitably exceptional nature of the weave of the cloth.” Flury-Lemberg also discovered a peculiar stitching pattern in the seam of one long side of the Shroud, where a three-inch wide strip of the same original fabric was sewn onto a larger segment. The stitching pattern, which she says was the work of a professional, is surprisingly similar to the hem of a cloth found in the tombs of the Jewish fortress of Masada. The Masada cloth dates to between 40 B.C. and 73 A.D. The evidence, says Flury-Lemberg, is clear: “The linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin does not display any weaving or sewing techniques which would speak against its origin as a high quality product of the textile workers of the first century.”