I have to thank Joe Marino for alerting me (via his weekly round-up of Shroud news to which everybody interested in the Shroud should subscribe) to a series of three interviews with Giulio Fanti conducted by Archpriest Kirill Ivanov, an Orthodox priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. How they occurred is a mystery to me, as the archpriest asks questions in Russian and Fanti replies in Italian, but for us a fairly coherent and apparently accurate translation into English is provided by YouTube’s automatic dubbing service. The Archpriest’s channel is called ‘С попом обо всем!’ which literally means ‘With the priest about everything,’ although попом is a more informal word for priest than normal.
Anyway, the titles of the three parts are (as dubbed), ‘Proven: The Turin Shroud is Real,’ ‘The Secrets of the Holy Fire and the Shroud Revealed!’ and ‘The Distortion Problem on the Shroud,’ and although together they are about two and a half hours long, they condense, via the auto-dub, into much less.
Giulio Fanti has conducted more research into the Shroud than almost anybody else, and published 17 books and 139 papers on the subject. He has promoted innovative attempts to date textiles without using radiocarbon, and manufactured unique devices to help his investigations. However, everything he does is predicated on his absolute certainty that the Shroud is authentic, so is not primarily intended to determine whether it is Christ’s burial cloth or not, but to demonstrate to skeptics that it must be, or to discover more about the circumstances that brought the image about. When Ivanov asks, “so you are convinced of the Shroud’s authenticity?” Fanti replies, “no, not convinced. I’m not just convinced; I’m certain. […] Frankly speaking, for me, there are no arguments against authenticity.” That being so, what are we to make of those who doubt it? “Opponents of authenticity […] act in two ways that I would call insidious. One of them is diabolic.” Rather disingenuously, Fanti quickly explains that he does not mean devilish, but is using the word in an etymological sense, meaning divisionary – “diabolical means ‘dividing.’ The word ‘diabolo’ precisely refers to one who divides.” This is absolute nonsense. Diabolic has meant satanic for over two thousand years, and before that it meant slanderous, and it has never had anything to do with division. What’s more, the divisionary tactic he accusers skeptics of is exactly the same tactic used by authenticists to try to discredit a medieval provenance. For Fanti, the Shroud requires a multidisciplinary approach. “If we separate the various aspects of the research, it becomes much easier to attack each one individually.” And he’s quite right. But authenticists are forever insisting, regarding their lists of essential characteristics of the Shroud, that unless every one is precisely verified, the whole medieval argument collapses. In the same way, unless every individual aspect of the authenticist case withstands criticism, then their whole case falls apart. Fanti accuses medievalists of disparaging results that contradict their position, and only considering data (“often outdated”) which support their point of view. Well, I accuse authenticists of disparaging results that contradict their position, and only considering data (“often outdated”) which support their point of view. Let’s move on.
Some of the salient topics arising during the interviews are the part the so-called ‘Holy Fire’ played in the production of the image, and what Fanti calls its “selective radioactivity,” which he thinks is “extremely high” in some areas: “ten thousand to a hundred thousand times more radioactive than a normal sample.” We shall come back to that. Overall, Fanti’s explanation for the image is that “electric fields are capable of producing images […] especially if they are associated with certain chemical reactions.”Meanwhile he also mentions the alleged congruity between Byzantine coins and the Shroud image, ignoring details which contradict his position, and only considering data which support his point of view. The coins all share numerous features, which may sensibly be understood not to have arisen independently, but to derive from an original. These certainly include a beard and moustache and shoulder length hair, but also the cruciform halo, book held in the left hand and the gesture with the right. None of these can derive from the Shroud, so the prototype image must have been something else, known about in Constantinople 250 years before Image of Edessa arrived, and complete with halo, book and gesturing hand. The ‘numismatist argument’ never considers this at all, but generally supposes a queue of coin designers individually trekking through Moslem occupied territory to view the Shroud itself in Edessa, presumably inventing the other details quite independently of each other.
Fanti also considers the DNA on the Shroud, as researched by Gianni Barcaccia and colleagues, announcing that of the identifiable human DNA, only 5.6% was of Western origin, with rest divided largely among Jews and Indians. However, the fraction mostly attributed to Jews is also common to a population in Spain, and most of the Indian fraction comes from a small state on the East Coast rather than the Indus valley where it has been proposed that the Shroud might have been woven. I feel that the identification of the DNA suffers from the same methodological difficulties as Max Frei’s identification of the pollen. The database with which to compare it is insufficiently comprehensive for any meaningful origins to be established. Besides which, without identifying individuals, it is not clear how many people are represented by the 5.6% or the 50%.
Now let’s get on to the meat of the interviews, which consists of Fanti’s connecting the image, the “wrong” radiocarbon date and the ‘selective radioactivity’ of the Shroud fibres with the Miracle of the Holy Fire which supposedly takes place every Easter at the site of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Along the way, he remarks that: “The image is a negative. Yes, this is indeed one of the most important characteristics of the image. However, it should be kept in mind that we only see the negative when photographing the shroud in visible light. If we use special photographic films or, as is now the case, special sensors, and take pictures in the infrared range the picture changes. If we photograph in the near infrared range, with a wavelength of about one micrometer, the image disappears completely. […] But the most interesting thing happens if we use a sensor sensitive to the far infrared range, that is wavelengths of about 8 to 12 micrometres. What happens then? The image reappears. But this time in the positive.” “What we see changes from negative to no image then to positive.”
This is very confused, and seems to muddle two senses of the word ‘negative.’ Let’s begin with the statement that the Shroud itself, with dark image on a light background, is a negative. Then when it is photographed in either visible or 8-12µm infrared, the image on the film appears as pale on a dark background. The two are the same. Calling one a negative and one a positive is meaningless. We only see the visible light image as an accurate copy of the original because the film has been photographed again, so that the light-on-dark of the film becomes the dark-on-light of the printed image. This is not done with an IR image. In 1978 Joseph (not August) Accetta and Steven Baumgart tried to obtain an image using 8-14µm and 3-5µm radiation, achieving moderate success with the longer wavelength but nothing with the shorter, but they did not believe this was a feature of the subject, saying “this result is attributed to differences in instrument apertures and hence basic sensitivities rather than physical attributes of the surface.”
The discussion of the Holy Fire begins with a short video of Fanti waving a bunch of thin wax candles, well afire, under his chin and around his face, to demonstrate that the fire in the Holy Sepulchre at Easter is cold. When I first saw it I was impressed, and really wondered if there was such a thing. And before I go on I must say I’m also impressed by Fanti’s insistence on finding out these things for himself rather than relying on second hand reports. However, it turns out that the phenomenon is not as astonishing as it seems, as I have confirmed myself, in most unmiraculous conditions, and without leaving my house.
Not only that, but after publishing a book with comprehensive evidence that the Holy Fire does not start as the result of a miracle, Dimitris Alikakos not only had claims for damages by Orthodox authorities dismissed, but the official website of the Jerusalem Patriarchate quietly renamed the miracle as only a ceremony. In February this year (2026), the Court of First Instance of Athens formally declared that “There is no miracle. The Holy Fire is lit with matches or a lighter.”1
It is intriguing that as far as I know this is the only instance of an alleged miracle being formally denied in a secular court of law. As we know, the sindonological world is thick with lawyers declaring that no court of law could deny the Shroud’s authenticity (or more specifically would accept the radiocarbon dating), and as we know, in the only three quasi-judicial enquiries into it that have actually occurred (that we know of), its authenticity was indeed specifically denied. Be careful what you wish for is my advice.
Fanti also shows us an experiment in which a ‘Holy’ flame burnt a hole in a piece of cloth which an ordinary flame scarcely scorched. Once again, however, anybody experimenting at home can see that any two flames, however apparently identical, will affect cloth differently, one setting fire before the other. And that’s not including any inherent confirmation bias that might quite unconsciously affect the way an experimenter holds the cloth.
Fanti goes on to mention a Russian scientist, Andrei Volkov, who carried out some measurements during the Holy Fire appearance in 2008. According to Fanti, Volkov “demonstrated a close connection between the Holy Fire, the process of its generation, and electric fields; so close that his instruments designed to measure the phenomenon were off-scale.” And all this when Volkov was actually outside the Holy Sepulchre, in the square in front of the church. An interview with Volkov can be found at https://pravoslavie.ru/37415.html?fbclid=IwAR2wzsSBoWyVYSlXHP7Muij1rxbv-a8xudx6Hrhj7dBdcYQn85FRzG9pCOw. In it he explains how he came to be separated from his team, and ended up with just his detector and an oscilloscope, and during the course of six hours of observation, noticed a single electromagnetic pulse at 3:04pm, which he associated with the precise moment of the miracle. He says nothing about anything going off the scale, and it is not unlikely that an alternative explanation for the surge, other than the so-called ‘descent of the Holy Fire,’ was responsible.
Apart from his candles, Fanti also took an AlphaLab Air Ion Counter, and measured the ambient ion count. He says: “I brought an ion meter inside the Holy Sepulchre. This device showed an ionisation level approximately 50 times higher than normal. Before the Holy Fire appeared, I measured about 140 ions per square centimetre [I think this is a translation error. Fanti knows very well that the ion meter measures ions per cubic centimetre]. After the Holy Fire appeared, the value reached 6040 ions per square centimetre.” This is exactly what might be expected in a crowded room filled with candles being moved rapidly about. His next statement only acknowledges a fraction of this. “And I will add here a possible objection from some critics of my findings. They will say, ‘Yes, the ionisation level turned out to be higher as the candles themselves produce ions.’ Ah, but it seems strange to me that all these candles could increase the original measurement value by fifty times.” On the contrary, it seems perfectly likely. A paper by Matthew Wright and his team at Bristol University reports a ten-times increase in negative ion count while burning a single tea-light in a laboratory.2 A fifty times increase in the church of the Holy Sepulchre crammed with excited people waving huge flames seems entirely reasonable.
Finally, let’s return to Fanti’s claim that the radioactivity of the Shroud was “extremely high” in some areas: “ten thousand to a hundred thousand times more radioactive than a normal sample.” In his paper, ‘New Insights on Blood Evidence from the Turin Shroud Consistent with Jesus Christ’s Tortures,’ Fanti shows a reading from some blood fibres on a glass slide of 11 alpha and 903 beta counts over 7000s. If this is ten thousand times normal, then a normal sample would take 70000000s to reach the same count. 70000000 seconds is more than two years, and suggests that over all that time, the counter would record only one beta-particle per day. That is wholly incredible.
Now I actually have a lot of respect for Fanti. He is a real scientist who carries out real experiments with real particles associated with Shroud, and I suspect his observations are impeccable. They do, however, raise a number of queries which are not resolved in his papers or interviews.
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1). See holyfirethetruth.com/?lang=en.
2). ‘Small-Ion and Nano-Aerosol Production During Candle Burning: Size Distribution and Concentration Profile with Time,’ Matthew Wright et al., Aerosol Science and Technology, 2007