A Companion to Mediterranean History

A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

chapter twenty-four

Introduction

Shared sacred places are shrines and sanctuaries that attract pilgrims across the religious
frontier. Muslim, Christian and Jewish men and women visitors have mingled in many
such places across the Mediterranean during annual festivals in groups or between
feasts as individuals seeking help and healing. This is a common pattern in territories
where populations from more than one religious group have lived side by side.
Religious sites are places where primary identities are performed and validated and
where the presence of outsiders is not normally expected. This is especially the case
during celebrations and festivals when communities come together or during conflicts
or times of political tension when members of other religious groups can be barred
from entering holy spaces. But shared sacred places are special: these are spaces where
connectivity and memory of mixing are made real as a shared experience, spaces where
historical and social memory can be enacted: the past informs present co-habitation
practices and rituals. As such, they can perhaps be seen as the very loci of Mediterranean-
ness, a region where religious, linguistic and cultural differences have coexisted and
where different peoples have lived side by side, not always peacefully, for generations
(see also Catlos, Epstein, this volume).
The practices of sharing sacred space are associated with pre-national states and
seem to be strongest in the eastern Mediterranean, within the larger Byzantine and
Ottoman lands, once part of multi-secular and multicultural empires. Many of these
shrines are built in borderlands and are associated with a history of conversions and
conflicts, a context that allows for the development of syncretic ritual practices, essen-
tially outside cities and far from central authorities (Couroucli, 2012a). Shared holy
places prosper in liminal places, frontiers or travel spaces, situated far from official
headquarters and centers of religious hierarchies; in the larger Ottoman world, mixed
practices have taken place in monasteries, country shrines, or marginal city sanctuaries
and have been associated with pilgrims and visitors, rather than with parishioners and
members of local congregations. In fact, the proximity of ecclesiastic hierarchies and

Shared Sacred Places

maria couroucli