Saint Bessus

Saint Bessus (Italian: San Besso) is a Christian martyr whose cult is concentrated in the western Italian Alps, above all in the Canavese district of Piedmont and in the valley of Cogne in the Aosta Valley. Almost nothing about him can be established from contemporary historical evidence. The stories that describe his life were written down many centuries after the period in which he is supposed to have lived, and they blend local Alpine devotion with the wider legend of the Theban Legion. In the most common account, Bessus was a soldier of that Egyptian Christian unit which, in late Roman hagiography, was massacred at Agaunum (now Saint-Maurice in the Swiss Valais) for refusing pagan sacrifice during the reign of Maximian in the late third century. Bessus is said to have escaped the slaughter and fled south into the Graian Alps.

There the legend presents him as a hermit in the high pastures between Val Soana and the Cogne valley, converting shepherds and mountain people. Accounts of his death differ. In one version, soldiers or imperial agents tracked him down and hurled him from a cliff. In another, local hunters or shepherds threw him from the rock that later became the site of his sanctuary. Some modern folklorists and historians of religion have suggested that the figure of Bessus may overlay an older Alpine cult attached to the high pastures and the protection of flocks, later reinterpreted as a Christian martyr. No archaeological or documentary proof confirms any of these reconstructions, and the historical existence of Bessus as a distinct individual remains uncertain.

The centre of the cult is the Santuario di San Besso, a mountain shrine at about 2,000 metres in the territory of Campiglia Soana (comune of Valprato Soana, province of Turin). Each year on 10 August a pilgrimage brings the people of Campiglia Soana and of Cogne to the sanctuary; the rites include a procession, the blessing of animals, and the assertion of ancient communal rights on the high pastures. Relics attributed to the saint are kept in the cathedral of Ivrea, and he is honoured as a patron of that city as well as of Campiglia Soana and Cogne. He is invoked especially by shepherds and by the inhabitants of the surrounding Alpine valleys. In Ivrea a separate liturgical commemoration has been observed in early December.

Because the entire dossier is legendary, neither a year of birth nor a securely documented year of death can be given. Tradition places him in the age of Maximian or of the Diocletianic persecution, that is, in the late third or early fourth century, but that dating depends solely on the Theban Legion story and cannot be treated as historical fact. His cult is of long standing and belongs to the ancient saints whose veneration was accepted by the Church without a formal modern canonization process.