The Chapel of St. Helena in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

The Chapel of St. Helena is an underground chapel inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the church built on the site where Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose from the dead. The chapel lies just a few meters from Golgotha, the Stone of Anointing, and the Tomb of Jesus. It is named after Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine, who came to Jerusalem in the 4th century and discovered the Cross of Christ at this sacred site.

The Chapel of St. Helena holds a profound place in Christian faith and devotion. It is closely connected to the discovery of the True Cross, one of the most sacred events in the history of Christianity. For Christians, this gives the chapel a unique spiritual significance: it is a place intimately connected with the Cross of Christ and with the story of His Passion and Resurrection.

While the Church is filled with sacred places and pilgrims, the Chapel of St. Helena offers a uniquely peaceful atmosphere. Here, believers can step away from the movement of the Church and gather in silence, prayer, and reflection. It is a place to pause, pray, and feel a personal connection to the sacred history of Jerusalem and to the faith that has been carried here for centuries.

Where the Chapel of St. Helena is

The chapel is on the lower level of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on its eastern side. From the entrance you pass the Stone of Anointing, walk around the ambulatory that curves behind the main Greek Orthodox church, and find a stairway leading down between two small chapels, the Chapel of the Division of the Robes and the Chapel of the Derision.

About 29 steps lead down to the chapel. The walls on either side of the stairway are covered with hundreds of small crosses cut into the stone, left by pilgrims over the centuries as a mark that they had come. They are among the most moving things in the whole church, because each one is a prayer that someone carried a very long way.

What you see inside

The chapel as it stands today was built in the 12th century, when the Crusaders rebuilt the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Four columns carry a dome that lets daylight down into the space, and oil lamps hang from the vaults in the Eastern manner.

The chapel belongs to the Armenian Apostolic Church, one of the communities that share the care of the Holy Sepulchre. Armenians call it the Chapel of St. Gregory the Illuminator, after the saint who brought Christianity to Armenia, while most pilgrims and guidebooks know it as the Chapel of St. Helena.

There are two apses, each with an altar. One is dedicated to St. Helena. The other is dedicated to the penitent thief, the man crucified beside Jesus who asked to be remembered, known in tradition as St. Dismas. The mosaic floor is modern, made in the 20th century, and part of it shows the churches of historic Armenia. In one corner is a stone seat where, the old tradition says, Helena sat and watched while the search for the Cross went on below.

Who St. Helena was

Helena was the mother of Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity. She was born around the middle of the third century and became a Christian herself. Late in her life, around the years 326 to 328, she traveled to the Holy Land as an elderly woman with the emperor’s backing, visited the places connected with the life of Jesus, gave generously to the poor, and was associated with the building of churches at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives.

During the same years Constantine ordered a great church to be built over the sites of the Crucifixion and the Tomb. That church was dedicated on September 13 in the year 335, and the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is still kept the following day, September 14. Helena is honored as a saint across the Christian world. The Catholic Church keeps her feast on August 18, and the Orthodox churches remember her together with Constantine on May 21.

The Finding of the Cross

The tradition is that Helena, searching near Calvary, found the cross on which Jesus died, together with the crosses of the two thieves. It is worth being clear about what history can confirm. The bishop Eusebius, who lived at the time and described Helena’s journey, does not mention the discovery. The story first appears in writers around the end of that same century, among them St. Ambrose of Milan and the historian Rufinus. By then the wood of the Cross was already being venerated in Jerusalem, as St. Cyril of Jerusalem records in the middle of the 300s.

From the Chapel of St. Helena a second stairway goes down again, into the rock, to the Chapel of the Finding of the Cross, which is cared for by the Franciscans. This lowest chapel is cut into an ancient quarry, the same quarry beside which the rock of Calvary once stood. A statue above its altar shows St. Helena holding the Cross. Archaeologists note that the link between this exact spot and the discovery is first attested in the Middle Ages, so the honest way to say it is this: no one can prove where the Cross was found, but Christians have prayed in this place, in memory of that finding, for many hundreds of years.

The Chapel of St. Vartan and the pilgrim’s ship

Beyond a gate on the north side of the Chapel of St. Helena lies another space, found during excavations in the 1970s and now called the Chapel of St. Vartan. It is opened only by arrangement with the Armenian community. On one of its ancient walls is a drawing of a small sailing ship with a Latin inscription usually read as DOMINE IVIMUS, “Lord, we went” or “Lord, we came.” Many scholars connect the words with Psalm 122, “Let us go into the house of the LORD,” and see in it the mark of very early Christian pilgrims who had crossed the sea to reach this place. Whoever drew it did what the pilgrims on the staircase did with their crosses. They left a sign that they had arrived.

Your prayer in the Chapel of St. Helena

When you send a prayer through Holy Land Prayer, it is printed and carried into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where it is placed inside one of the chapels, a priest prays it, and a candle is lit on your behalf. The photos we email to you are taken in the Chapel of St. Helena, because it is the part of the church where this kind of photography is possible.

There is something fitting in that. This chapel has always belonged to pilgrims who came from far away, and its stairway is lined with the marks of people who wanted their prayer to stay behind after they had gone home. A printed prayer placed here belongs to the same long tradition.

Prayers to pray in this chapel, or from wherever you are

A prayer before the Cross

A traditional prayer, said at each of the Stations of the Cross.

A prayer for those who are searching

The prayer of the penitent thief

From Luke 23:42. One of the two altars in this chapel is dedicated to the man who first prayed it, and it remains one of the shortest and most complete prayers a person can say.

For more, see our most famous prayers in Christianity, prayers for forgiveness, and prayers for healing.

Bible verses for this place

Questions people ask about the Chapel of St. Helena

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