Other remains of Balkh's splendour include ancient Buddhist reliquary mounds and later Islamic shrines and mosques.
The simple wooden coffin will be placed in a side chapel next to Michelangelo's "Pietà." In a 21st-century twist on an ancient tradition, during the ceremony, Benedict kissed a reliquary in the form of a silver olive branch holding a test tube filled with some of John Paul's blood, part of a supply saved by a Rome hospital in case the pontiff needed a transfusion.
In the 1970s the government of Thailand, with the help of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), undertook the restoration of the ancient site of Sukhothai, which includes several temples (wats), reliquary monuments (chedis, or stupas), ornamental ponds, and statues of Buddha.
Valued at $200 million or more, the collection included two ancient manuscripts, one of them written in gold ink, and a number of ornate reliquaries that were believed in medieval times to hold relics like a splinter of wood from Noah's Ark and a few drops of milk from the Virgin Mary.
LaGamma, as she did in "Eternal Ancestors," with a display of European and Asian reliquaries, begins on a cross-cultural note, complementing cast-brass Benin heads with ancient Egyptian and Roman marbles.
Really: the centerpiece of the restaurant is a black steel "sculptural freezer reliquary," as Mr. Goggin called it, a cradle that will house an ancient two-ton block of blue ice that is planned to be wrested from the Greenland Basal Ice Sheet by a scientific expedition next March.
During the Middle Ages, ancient gems were often set into other treasured objects, such as jewelry, book covers, and even crosses and reliquaries.
Other reliquaries are architectural.
Relics and reliquaries were really about communication.
