386 maria couroucli
where one and the same priest celebrated mass in both the Catholic and the Orthodox
church of the village, standing on either side of the valley.^1
Shared shrines: a Mediterranean specificity?Is there something specifically Mediterranean about shared sacred spaces? The most
obvious answer is that this kind of syncretic practice is more common in the
Mediterranean world than elsewhere, in the home of all three major religions that
have shaped the Western world. It is also one of the regions in which the humble and
the illiterate have learned to accommodate themselves to more than one lord during
a lifetime.
Some general trends can be observed in more than one configuration of sharing
holy places. First, these are generally places of worship and pilgrimage, associated with
a saint or other holy figure and related to the specific place through an object or
emblematic ritual image (tomb, icon, tree, water source or other natural object).
Second, they are situated in similarly marginal locations: as mentioned above, most
of these practices take place far from centers of official worship and/or political power.
Many of these holy places have lost their hinterland populations and are affecting
many more “others”, as the demographic importance of their original communities
has been dwindling. These are long processes and many traces of those changes have
been lost; most of them can be found in the post-Ottoman areas (this is especially true
of the Balkans, in Anatolia, the Middle and Near East and in North Africa); the main
players across this vast region are Jews, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Armenian
and Coptic Christians, and Sunni, Sufi, Alevi or Bektashi Mulims.
Pilgrims’ habitusWhat do we know about the pilgrims’ point of view? In what kinds of ritual activity
are they involved inside these holy sites? How do they approach the web of religious
references and symbols? Ethnographers have emphasized the combination of diversity
and familiarity in ritual practices and in the attitudes of visitors and pilgrims. Many of
these practices travel through space and time across the Mediterranean and beyond.
Such is the case for example with sacred trees on which pilgrims sometimes fasten
strips of cloth: they can be observed from Moroccan tombs of Jewish saints to
Muslim shrines shared by Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab in India, via Macedonia,
Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (in türbe and Bektashi tekke standing where Christian
churches once stood). Their significance varies. Sometimes they are said to repre-
sent the illness the saint inhabiting the tree will take from the worshiper. In other
cases they function as ex-votos, as reminders of wishes expressed to, or promises to
be kept by, the saint to whom the pilgrim came for help. Rubbing coins against
tombs or walls, touching the shrine believed to have healing powers, going through
sacred passageways (chains, holes in walls, caves, or under Christ’s decorated
wooden sepulcher inside Orthodox churches at Easter), lighting candles, leaving
prayer wishes scribbled on scraps of paper, drinking water from holy fountains,
offering sugar cubes to other pilgrims during the festival—these are some of the
most common ritual activities. Many shrines welcome pilgrims practicing incuba-
tion (sleeping overnight inside the shrine hoping to be healed from illness through