St. Matthew's Burial Site

St. Matthew's Burial Site

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It is popularly theorized that the burial site of St. Matthew, one of the authors of Scripture, is located at the bottom of Lake Issyk-Kul. After the death of the Apostle in Syria, in the 3rd century, a group of Christians transferred the burial site of St. Matthew to Central Asia, fearing desecration by the Romans. They looked for a place where no Roman legionary could reach. The Christians found a big lake with clear water. This was Lake Issyk-Kul. There, they gave the Apostle’s relics to the earth and founded a monastery next to it. Later, with the rise of the level of the lake, the monastery and burial site of the Apostle went under water. A central component of this theory is the famous Catalan map, which denotes an Armenian monastery near the so-called Issikol Lake in Central Asia, with an inscription that it is the resting place of St. Matthew.

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