Wednesday 1 July 2015

choose wisely

While out on loan, the Nanteos Cup, conflated for around the past century with the Holy Grail, the was stolen last summer but is now returned almost one year later, reports the intrepid Atlas Obscura.
The wooden drinking vessel is reputed to contain a sliver of the True Cross and is imbued with miraculous healing properties and the Welsh Nanteos estate, which it’s named for, will lend it out freely to the sick in hopes of curing them. The Sturm und Drang of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Parsifal at the turn of the century was what benighted the cup and made it one more of the several hundred candidates (literal and abstract) found in Europe. Whatever the origin, it is nonetheless quite a treasured cup and a quite massive sting operation was launched in Wales, which led to its recovery, concluding with a shadowy, midnight hand-off.