Place · Christian cave shrine · India
Little Mount, Chennai
Also known as Little Mount, Chinnamalai, Shrine of Our Lady of Health, Saidapet shrine
The low hillock at Saidapet in southwestern Chennai traditionally identified as the cave refuge of the Apostle Thomas before his martyrdom on St. Thomas Mount — the Chinnamalai of Tamil tradition. The surviving cave contains the handprint and footprints the Thomas Christian tradition attributes to the apostle, and a natural spring the tradition says Thomas struck from the rock to quench his pursuers. The 1551 Portuguese chapel built against the cave entrance and the 1971 circular Shrine of Our Lady of Health raised beside it together make Little Mount one of the three Thomas-related Chennai sites, forming with St. Thomas Mount and San Thome Basilica the local triad of the apostolic tradition.
- Date
- 72
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Patron dynasty
- Portuguese · Indian Union
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 13.024, 80.218
Connections (3)
- Site withinMadras / Chennai
Little Mount sits in southwestern Chennai at Saidapet, within the modern city limits, three kilometres from St. Thomas Mount and ten kilometres from San Thome at Mylapore. The cave the Thomas Christian tradition identifies as the apostle's refuge before his martyrdom, the 1551 Portuguese chapel built against it, and the 1971 circular shrine beside it together make it one of Chennai's three apostolic sites and part of the city's Christian pilgrimage geography.
- Site adjacencySt. Thomas Mount, Chennai
Little Mount and St. Thomas Mount are three kilometres apart in southwestern Chennai, the two halves of the local Thomas martyrdom tradition. Little Mount is identified as the cave where the apostle hid and prayed before his death; St. Thomas Mount, the 90-metre hill to the southwest, is identified as the site of the killing itself in 72 CE. The Portuguese chapel at Little Mount (1551) and the Portuguese church at St. Thomas Mount (1523) frame the pilgrimage pair that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Nestorian and later Latin visitors already describe as a single stational route.
- Site adjacencySan Thome, Mylapore
Little Mount and San Thome at Mylapore are the two inland and coastal poles of the Chennai Thomas tradition — the cave of the refuge and the tomb of the burial. Marco Polo in 1292 and the Portuguese chroniclers of 1517 both describe pilgrims moving between the sites. The 1551 Little Mount chapel and the 1523 Portuguese basilica at San Thome, rebuilt in the 1890s, together with St. Thomas Mount form the three Chennai apostolic sites the Thomas Christian community of Kerala and the Latin Catholic community of the Tamil coast share.
Sources
Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
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