Mylapore
A district of Chennai on the south-east coast of India. The tradition of the Syro-Malabar Church places the martyrdom and tomb of the apostle Thomas here, and Marco Polo’s editor identifies it with the town of the saint’s shrine that Polo describes.
Mylapore is now part of Chennai. A chronology published by an eparchy of the Syro-Malabar Church gives it as the place where the apostle Thomas was martyred, on 3 July 72, and where his tomb was (Syro-Malabar Eparchy of Melbourne, Significant Dates 72 and 883). Marco Polo, in 1298, describes a small town in the province of Maabar where the body of St Thomas lay and where Christians and Muslims came on pilgrimage. He does not name it; his editor Henry Yule identifies it with Mylapore (Marco Polo, Travels 3.18, with Yule’s note 1). The Acts of Thomas, the oldest account cited in this wiki, puts the apostle’s death on a mountain in the kingdom of a king Misdeus and names no town; see Thomas and India.
What happened here
- AD 52, traditional dateThe Apostle Thomas and the Christians of India
Tradition holds that the apostle Thomas preached in India and died there. The oldest account cited, the Acts of Thomas, sets him at the court of a King Gundaphoros; the tradition of Kerala and Mylapore is attested later. Cosmas reports churches in India about AD 547.