shared sacred places 383
presence of pilgrims and visitors belonging to other denominations; in their eyes they
are a result of the importance of the sanctuary or holy figure associated with it. In
Macedonia, for example, Christians and Muslims visit sanctuaries at different times;
they practice inside churches turned into mosques or in Bektashi mausoleums that
sometimes contain both icons of Christian saints and the tomb of the Muslim holy
man venerated by the locals. In the church of Sveti Nicola near Makedonski Brod,
Christians welcome Muslims venerating the tomb of a local Bektashi saint, Hadir
Baba, built inside the church, while in the city of Stip, the local mosque is turned into
a Christian sanctuary on August 2 to celebrate the Prophet Elijah (Bowman, 2012a).
Here as elsewhere, the holy places’ caretakers’ religious identities were clear to both
visitors and pilgrims from “other” denominations.
As Hasluck had maintained in his early twentieth-century study of the Balkans
(1929) “sharing” practices may at some point in time have been the result of local
strategies of adjustment to new religious equilibriums and boundaries established in
the aftermath of conflicts, population movements and conversions; nevertheless the
presence of “others” in the sacred area cannot be attributed to any top-down policy
or religious dogma. On the contrary, there is evidence that top-down policies have
been employed at all times to stop these phenomena; sharing sacra has never been an
option for central authorities, who promote clear-cut identities and boundaries.
As Poujeau (2012) has shown for Syria, mountain monasteries situated far from the
bishop’s see, like St Thecla’s convent near Maloula, are places where marginal activi-
ties are possible, like marriage ceremonies during a mourning period or the presence
of Muslim pilgrims inside a Christian sanctuary. These are fragile equilibriums subject
to reversal during periods of tension or conflict, as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s or in
Egypt today, where the days when Muslims and Copts venerated the same saints and
went to the same festivals disappear into the realm of nostalgia, making room for a
new fundamentalist religious revival among both communities (Mayeur-Jaouen,
2012). Hayden (2002), who compared the Yugoslav case with India, maintains that
sharing by more than one religious community is competitive and temporary and
shared shrines are rather of “antagonistic tolerance,” used as symbols of dominance
by political forces.
The phenomenon of multicultural followers of deities and holy figures who travel
from afar to visit famous temples situated in or near important borderlands in the
southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean is referred to by Lucian in the sec-
ond century ce in On the Syrian goddess (Lightfoot, 2003). Lucian writes about the
abundance of offerings to the temple of Atargatis in Hierapolis in Syria. Pilgrims came
not only from nearby hinterlands like Cappadocia but also from as far as India,
Ethiopia, Persia, Armenia, and Egypt. The early anchorites of the Christian era, the
Desert Fathers of Egypt and Syria, also attracted multicultural followers, from both
western and eastern Mediterranean Christian lands, from Britons and Gauls to
Armenians and Persians (Fowden, 1999: 59). In the Euphrates river area, an impor-
tant frontier zone during the campaigns of Alexander the Great that remained so
beyond late antiquity and into the Byzantine period, the cult of Saint Sergius, a mili-
tary saint venerated by populations on both sides of the river, Christian and Muslim,
spread in Syria and Mesopotamia during the fifth and sixth centuries (Fowden, 1999).
Similarly, the contemporary Muslim visitors to miraculous Jewish shrines in
Morocco mentioned above partake of a tradition that goes back to the end of the