Why a man from the mountains stole two sacred skulls from Zurich

Zurich altarpiece with Felix and Regula: Zurich's city saints offer their severed heads to Christ and are led by him into heaven. zVg

Zurich 500 years ago. The city is in upheaval. Altars are destroyed, relics removed. The bones of Felix and Regula are also targeted by the reformers, but they disappear – secretly – and reappear in a chapel in the Alps.

Perhaps he was sitting in the sacristy when he made the decision. Between bare walls, where only months ago the light of golden relics shimmered. Perhaps it was night. Perhaps he could hear the wind outside, the creaking of the beams. Hansli Benet knew that if he didn’t do it, nobody would. The skulls have to go.

It was clear that it would come to this. In 1524 Zurich was on the threshold of a new era. The reformer Huldrych Zwingli preached against images, altars, relics – against everything that had been considered an expression of Christianity for centuries. The new faith needed no bones or icons, only the Word. And the city government played its part.

Altars were removed, paintings taken down, shrines emptied. Even the Grossmünster cathedral wasn’t spared. The remains of Felix and Regula, Zurich’s patron saints, had rested there for centuries.

According to legend, they were siblings, members of the Theban Legion, a legendary Christian unit that refused to worship Roman gods. They fled to Zurich around AD300, were captured and beheaded on the site where the Wasserkirche later stood.

Tradition has it that they took their severed heads in their hands and walked up the hill to the place where the Grossmünster was later built.

This macabre legend turned them into symbolic figures of steadfastness in faith, and their bones into relics.

The oldest known depiction of the Zurich city saints Felix and Regula in the Stuttgart Passionale from the year 1130. Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart

The power of relics

The cult of such remains began early on, perhaps as early as the catacombs of Rome, where early Christians prayed at the tombs of the martyrs.

“In the late Middle Ages, the devotion to relics was very pronounced,” says Zurich church historian Peter Opitz. “Political princes, cities and churches collected relics, so that in some cases there was a veritable trade. The cult of relics was good business for the church in particular.”

But the system began to falter. Too many relics, too many miracles: there were enough splinters from the cross of Christ to build a whole ship. The change in thinking and culture – accelerated by the printing press, education and church scandals – undermined the authority of these shrines.

“Reliquary piety is the belief in experiencing closeness to God through physical proximity to the bones or objects of particularly holy people,” Opitz explains. “But there’s no indication of this in the Bible. On the contrary: any worship of creatures is condemned there as superstition, even blasphemy.”

The case of the city patrons

Initially, the tombs of Felix and Regula remained untouched. But in December 1524 their protection also fell. The contemporary chronicler Bernhard Wyss wrote that “all the shrines and the coffins with their bones” were removed.

But it was not until almost a year later, in October 1525, that the relics of Felix and Regula were finally removed and probably buried.

But something happened: someone intervened. This someone knew the corridors and the hours when nobody asks. Perhaps it was a believer with courage, someone who didn’t want to leave everything to the new doctrine.

Later accounts mention a name: Hansli Benet from Ursern, a native of canton Uri who was staying in Zurich.

A new home for Felix and Regula

One night, it is said, he rescued the shrine with the bones – and headed for the hills. He travelled along the old mule tracks of the Gotthard route into the Urseren Valley. In Andermatt, he found what he was looking for: a small chapel, remote enough to preserve the forbidden.

For over a hundred years, nobody spoke of it. In 1648 a priest from Andermatt recorded that Hansli Benet had rescued the reliquary from Zurich in 1525 and brought it to the Urseren Valley.

In 1688 the hiding place is opened – with witnesses and under protocol. Two skulls are revealed, carefully bedded and accompanied by smaller bones and a parchment with an indication of origin.

From 1730 they are displayed in ornate reliquaries and carried in processions. The veneration remains, quieter than before but still alive.

A scientific view

In 1988 a scientific examination was carried out: are they really skulls from Roman times? Radiocarbon analyses show that the so-called Felix skull dates from the 11th or 12th century – from the late Middle Ages.

Whether these fragments actually come from the Grossmünster or were ever associated with Felix and Regula can no longer be determined.

The Regula skull, on the other hand, has a wooden centre in which two fragments of a Roman skull are embedded. This is more in keeping with the legend.

New home for the relics: The mountain village of Andermatt in Uri with the Catholic village church in the centre of the Urseren Valley. Keystone

For many Catholic believers, however, the authenticity of a relic is of secondary importance. “In the Catholic Church of enlightened countries, the devotion to relics is usually reinterpreted spiritually in such a way that the authenticity of a bone or object is ultimately irrelevant,” says Peter Opitz.

Today, the skulls rest in the parish church of Andermatt. They are no longer at the centre of a cult but are still the bearers of a story: of faith, flight, preservation and change.

Return to Zurich

In 1950 the newly built Catholic Church of St Felix and St Regula in Zurich received parts of the relics – a symbolic act, a homecoming for the city’s patron saints. And in 2011 they returned once again. For a few weeks they are on display in the crypt of the Grossmünster as part of an art project.

Many things in Zurich are reminiscent of its patron saints – from church and street names to the Knabenschiessen (boys’ shooting competition), which, although of secular origin, is linked chronologically and symbolically to the patronage of St Felix and St Regula.

Edited by Balz Rigendinger. Adapted from German by DeepL/ts