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charms bought in situ, how to interact with caretakers, priests and other pilgrims.
Ethnographic studies of these kinds of shrine show that many ritual elements travel
across “religions” and “cultures” and take new forms and symbolic power in different
contexts. Anthropological perspectives, combining contextualization and compre-
hensive ethnography, offer a comparative general frame as well as detailed approaches
to what is going on in actual fact in and around shared holy spaces. Here are some
examples from field ethnography providing a “bottom-up” view of these phenomena.
In the village of Bilisht (Devoll region, Albania), Gilles De Rapper (2012) observed
sharing practices in the Satrivaç Bektashi sanctuary, venerated by Muslims and
Christians alike. Originally, this was a church dedicated to Sts Cosmas and Damian,
the healing saints of the Eastern Church, that was turned into a Muslim tekke during
Ottoman times. According to locals, “Satrivaç [is] the holiest place in the region.”
People would come from as far away as Korçë and even Tirana. “Satrivaç is a vakef for
all religions,” they explained:
Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Muslims go there, and so do Gypsies ... People who
are sick spend a night there, and are cured. ... There is no priest, but there are three
domestic servants ... Inside, there is a magic mirror. When a true believer places a coin
on it, it remains stuck to the mirror. They make a sacrifice of a sheep, and leave its head
and skin. (De Rapper, 2012: 31)Satrivaç is referred to as a vakëf, a sacred place for all religions, a mosque with icons,
not as a church. As elsewhere in the communist world, these “popular religious”
practices thrived during the communist period in Albania, precisely because they
did not necessitate the involvement of priests or any other representative of religious
authorities. Today, these sanctuaries are even more popular, as there is no longer a
ban on religious practice. Yet, De Rapper notes, there is no actual “sharing”:
Christians and Muslims visit the vakëf for different reasons. Their devotional prac-
tices are not the same and relations between the two religions are asymmetrical:
Christians welcome Muslims into Christian holy places but not the other way around
(2012: 32).
The second example comes from Turkey and Prinkipo/Buyukada Island near
Istanbul, where I have observed the rising numbers of people visiting St George’s
shrine in the Greek Orthodox monastery standing on top of the highest hill. I first
went there on the saint’s festival, on April 23 in 1992. A long queue was waiting out-
side the church. At the entrance, Greek orthodox caretakers were selling candles that
visitors, mostly women of Muslim tradition, clumsily lit and put in the brass chande-
liers in the narthex. A few also bought little bells, the symbol of the local saint, then
joined a second queue to reach an elderly priest sitting next to the saint’s main icon,
laden with silver ex-votos, rings, watches and other jewelry fixed between the icon
and its glass frame. The Greek Orthodox priest read to each one of them from a large
book of prayers: he would take the little bell, cross the icon, and ask in Turkish “who
is the prayer for?” before reading aloud a short prayer mentioning the person’s name
and handing back the bell to the pilgrim. Inside the altar area, another priest was
performing mass, accompanied by two monks singing from the psalter. The visitors
would then join the crowd moving across the church towards the exit door. On the
way, some of them would deposit their offerings (a white candle or a bottle of oil) on