[jeffc]

It is said that during the Middle Ages so many “pieces of The Cross” were sold around Europe, that you could build a number of very large boats with all of them.

[Genoa]

Grave robbers would break up skeletons into “holy relics.”

[agere_contra]

In 1870, a Frenchman named de Fleury went round the world and counted all the known pieces of the cross. He measured their size and published his findings in a book: Mémoire sur les Instruments de la Passion.

De Fleury rigorously measured all the known pieces and concluded that if all the surviving relics of the True Cross were somehow reassembled they would add up to about 0.004 cubic meters of wood.

The actual Cross would have been about 0.178 cubic meters in volume. So the known relics come to about 1/50 of the correct volume.