devotion and ancient Romanesque goldsmith art

The Romanesque goldsmith's art in all its splendor is artistically expressed in the "head" reliquary of Saint Stephen kept in the church of Santa Maria la Greca. Originally coming from the Benedictine abbey of Santo Stefano in the Monopoli area, and datable between the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. It is a chiseled silver artifact that reproduces the head and face of a crusader.

 

The communicative intensity in the representation of the face is made even more solid by the excellent overall state of conservation and is greatly enhanced by the shiny gilding on the hair, eyebrows, eye contour and ears. Attention to the coherence of the image is given by a rigorous and punctual distribution of the decorative parts, it should be observed, in fact, how the geometric succession of the curls of the hair is balanced in the lower part by the cluster motif of the inflorescences present on the collar.

 

Based on a comparison with a reliquary per head referring to the thirteenth century and kept at the Abbey of Melk, it has been hypothesized a probable origin from the Danube area, between Austria and Hungary.

 

The above reliquary contains within it a fragment of the skull of Santo Stefano Protomartire. The relic of the saint was kept by the Benedictine monks in the castle of Santo Stefano in Monopoli which took this name for this very reason. The castle was built by Goffredo Count of Conversano in 1086 and soon became the seat of the Benedictine order who thus founded the monastery, abbey.

 

It is assumed that the relic arrived in Italy following the first crusade, when in the year 1099 it was possible to conquer Jerusalem and take control of the Holy Sepulcher. Around the end of 1200 the Knights of Malta moved to this Abbey, they fortified it in order to control naval traffic to the Holy Land. At that time, the Abbey was home not only to the reliquary of Saint Stephen but also to the Byzantine icon of the Madonna della Madia.

 

The reliquary together with the Byzantine icon of the Madonna della Madia were transferred on December 26th 1394 to Putignano and placed in the original church of Santa Maria la Greca, to defend them from the continuous Turkish raids and pirate attacks, during the reign of Ladislao. (1377-1414). The people and peasants, intent on planting vines (cuttings) in the fields, joined the procession of religious translators along the path on foot.

 

This episode is at the origin of the feast of the "offshoots", still handed down on December 26 of each year, the day on which the Putignano Carnival begins.