The First Tourist

For more than a millennium she was a household name. Helena was as familiar a figure in Christian folklore as the characters in the Bible stories. Everyone from Pope to peasant knew how the elderly mother of the Emperor Constantine had travelled to the Holy Land and discovered the cross on which Jesus was crucified. Many in Britain believed she was both a home-grown saint and a royal princess. Then suddenly she ldisappeared from history, her memory preserved only in a scattering of place-names, church dedications, and religious relics. Following in the footsteps of Helena's pioneering pilgrimage almost seventeen centuries ago, the author set out to separate the fact from the fiction surrounding this enigmatic empress. Part contemporary travelogue, part historical detective inquiry, The First Tourist describes a personal quest which unexpectedly throws new light on the continuing controversy about the origins of the Christian church.