Place · Christian pilgrimage hill · India
St. Thomas Mount, Chennai
Also known as St. Thomas Mount, Parangi Malai, Mount of St Thomas
The 90-metre hill in southern Chennai traditionally identified as the site of the Apostle Thomas's martyrdom in 72 CE — Kerala's Thomas Christian tradition and the Portuguese Padres Pretos who built the Church of Our Lady of Expectation on the summit in 1523 both treat the hill as his death site. The present Portuguese-era church houses the Bleeding Cross believed to have been carved by Thomas himself. The hill is one of the three Thomas-related Chennai sites alongside San Thome Basilica on the Mylapore coast and the Little Mount cave of St Thomas.
- Date
- 72–None
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Patron dynasty
- Chera · Portuguese · Indian Union
- Tradition
- Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 12.995, 80.191
Connections (2)
- Site withinMadras / Chennai
St. Thomas Mount sits in southern Chennai, within the modern city limits, the 90-metre hill traditionally identified as the apostle Thomas's martyrdom site in 72 CE. The 1523 Portuguese church on the summit and the Bleeding Cross inside it anchor Chennai's Christian pilgrimage geography alongside San Thome Basilica and the Little Mount cave.
- Site adjacencyLittle 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.