shared sacred places 387
physical contact with the sanctuary). Early- twentieth-century ethnographic data
from the Black Sea area contains details about some of these ritual practices:
The Turks celebrated St. George’s day too. They called him Hitirelez ... Both the Turks and
the Greeks used to go, tore strips from their clothes and tied them to the branches of the
trees. Then they asked the saint for a favor. They also took small pebbles or coins and
tried to make them stick to stones. If they stuck, their wishes were granted. The Turks
had a tomb inside the tekke, covered with a green cloth, and said that there were bones
inside it. (Oral Tradition Archives of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies, Athens, PO 965.
See Couroucli, 2012b: 131)There are also recurrent features of the topography of shared holy places: they usu-
ally signify passages from the known into the unknown world, places where the
upper world and the chthonian realm meet and separate all at once. As if re-enacting
the epic connection between the famous and the infamous, which is the stuff of
ancient poetry (one may think of Aeneas’ katabasis, or “descent” to the under-
world, in Virgil’s Aeneid), they seem steeped in ancient oppositions and
symbolic representations of place. Underground passages leading to secret caves and
fountains, for example, can become purifying passageways to and from the spirit
world, as in Saint Dimitri in Kurucesme in Istanbul or in Saint Thecla’s monastery
(Deir Mar Taqla) in the village of Ma‘lula in Syria, where visitors to the saint’s tomb
have to bow to go through a low door in order to reach the cave where the tomb
stands (Poujeau, 2012: 214). Open spaces and ruins of sanctuaries, sometimes
rehabilitated and rebuilt, have been reported all over the Balkans and Anatolia since
the early twentieth century. Some are said to be monuments of conversion, churches
that have become Muslim places of worship, or, conversely, Muslim sanctuaries that
have become Christian shrines. Legends about these sites mention spirits guarding
these spaces against desecrating practices, especially when the sites have lost both
their original religious character and their corresponding populations. Again, this is
the case with many Christian sites in the post-Ottoman world, where the local
Muslim population is said to respect or even “fear” the spirit of the older saint still
present in his or her “house.”
Participants in shared practices are mostly local populations who are not zealots:
fanatics, radicals, activists or dogmatists cannot feel at home in shared shrines. Mixed
sanctuaries do not correspond to any dogmatic expression, however minimal; they are
local de facto responses. As such, they are part of local tradition and identity.
Ethnographic examples from many sites confirm this traditional multi-vocality and
peaceful character. In a number of sites in the Punjab in India, for example, Sikh,
Hindu and Muslim pilgrims come “to make and fulfill vows, pay homage, honor fam-
ily traditions, and experience the multicultural communitas that characterizes saints’
shrines throughout the subcontinent” (Bigelow, 2012: 30).
The diversity and mixing of religious groups may take different forms: sometimes
caretakers may belong to a different group from that of the clergy in charge of the
different celebrations and from that of circumstantial performers of prayers and other
rituals. Such is the case of the (Muslim) Bektashi tekke in Macedonia which is trans-
formed into Sveti Nicola Church overnight to allow Orthodox Christians to celebrate
St George’s festival on May 6 (Bowman, 2012a). In the Moroccan Rif, the caretakers