Rośliny korony cierniowej – botaniczne niewiadome
Crown of thorns plants – botanical unknowns

Summary/Abstract: According to tradition, one of the most valuable Christian relics, the crown of thorns, considered one of the tools of the Passion of Christ (arma Christi), was made from the shoots of a certain species of plants popularly called ‘thorny’. Despite ongoing research, the question of what species it was is still unresolved. On the base of information obtained from scientific and popular science literature, stories and legends, 16 candidate species were selected for the purposes of this study. Some of them occur in countries located in the Mediterranean basin, and some in Western and Central European countries. Particular attention was paid to species growing in Israel. A detailed analysis of the collected information allowed, in the first stage of the investigation, to reject among the candidate species those that did not occur in the Holy Land and/or whose morphological structure did not allow for the construction of a crown of thorns, and in the second stage, to indicate among the several remaining species a species that would be suitable for this purpose.

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