Over the past decades much of my research has concerned social relations around what are popularly referred to as ‘shared religious sites’. In my work I have diverged from that idiom, instead calling these ‘mixed’ sites in acknowledgement of the fact that the term ‘sharing’, which implies a positively balanced engagement with the alterity of other communities attending the sites, is, while often apt, not appropriate where persisting co-habitation is tense, if not openly hostile. Robert Hayden, a scholar with whom I have debated the dynamics of mixing since his 2002 Current Anthropology article on competitive sharing, speaks of ‘antagonistic tolerance’ occurring in situations where the balance of power between communities concurrently revering a holy place is such that each group’s hold on the site is equally strong or, alternatively, the power of the claim of one of the communities is weak enough to not threaten the other’s hegemony and can therefore be effectively ignored.1 Either way, the other is ‘put up with’; tolerance here is a negative term, and signs testifying to the other’s claim on the site are irritants. Dionigi Albera, however, criticizes the ‘primordialist reasoning’ underlying Hayden’s fixing of communal identity into antagonistic blocs and maintains that the mixing and sharing visible in coexistent practices and iconographies throughout the Mediterranean Basin, past and present, reveal a “fluidity and changeability of groups and identities,” suggesting that “in everyday life religious identities are frequently composites, and sometimes indeterminate.”2 Here signs of the other may be mutually revered, and sharing is unproblematic, if not celebrated. This dissension indicates a need for clarification about what conditions lend themselves to sharing, to various degrees of mixing, or to antagonisms merging on eviction.
Ironically, the Kariye Camii/Chora has, in its modality as a holy site, never been shared or mixed in any overt manner. An Orthodox Christian site since its foundation in the early 4th century, it was converted into a mosque between 1508 and 1511 by Atîk Ali Pasha. Paul A. Underwood writes that Ali Pasha, in order to mark the site as an exclusively Islamic one, ordered covered
with opaque media all anatomical elements pertaining strictly to human or living creatures, such as heads, hands and feet. In addition, all inscriptions and Christian attributes were similarly covered, but garments, elements of landscape and backgrounds were spared.3
Later, Underwood claims, all painted surfaces were whitewashed excepting only ornamental details on window soffits. Robert G. Ousterhout, writing with the hindsight of 45 years of archaeological work and resulting scholarship, claims that Ottoman iconoclasm was not so fierce prior to the 17th and 18th centuries and notes that as late as 1568 “the mosaics and frescoes remained visible.”4 Subsequently, they were covered with plaster and paint but, even then, not completely. Regardless of the intensity or temporality of Ottoman iconoclasm, the fact that by the late 19th century the mosaic and painted imagery on the interior walls was “covered by wooden doors, which the custodian [prompted by tourists] would open for a little bahşiş [bribe]” indicates that Christian imagery within the mosque was barely tolerated, and that only in situations bordering on the illicit.5
In 1945, under the nationalizing agenda established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the mosque was secularized and, like the Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia) earlier, was turned into a museum owned by the Turkish state and celebrating the mixed heritage of the Turkish people. With this changed function, Christian iconography was no longer problematic and became instead a legacy to be celebrated by both a national and an international audience. Thus, the Byzantine Institute of America was invited to clean and conserve the mosaics and frescoes (the Institute had undertaken a similar project in Hagia Sophia, starting in June 1931). It is important to note here, however, that we are no longer discussing a church or a mosque but instead a secular monument of a national heritage. Therefore, while bearing the traces of both roles, the building does not serve as a site of religious observance and in no way demands any particular religious comportment.
As Yael Navaro-Yashin argues in her Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, secularism and Islamism serve as different guises for a culture of statism whereby groups compete to claim Turkish culture for themselves and their ways of life.6 With the 1946 establishment of multi-party elections in Turkey, religion became politicized as an important tool for gaining and retaining power; “Islam henceforth became an integral part of the program of all center-right parties, which in turn could count on the financial and electoral support of religious interest groups.”7 After several decades of secular Kemalist rule, whether democratically established or imposed by the military to suppress perceived Islamicist populism, the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, Justice and Development Party), led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, won the 2002 national elections and, in 2003, made Erdoğan prime minister – despite his previously having been banned from office and jailed for inciting religious hatred while mayor of Istanbul. Erdoğan served two further terms as prime minister before being elected president of Turkey in 2014 (re-elected in 2018). In July 2020, the Council of State annulled the 1934 decision by Atatürk’s cabinet to establish Hagia Sophia as a museum, deciding that, since the building had been deeded as a mosque following the conquest of 1453, its use as anything but that was illegal. Erdoğan, announcing the first Friday prayers after the conversion of Hagia Sophia, drew parallels between his successful mayoral election in 1994 as the candidate of the Islamicist Welfare Party (subsequently banned from politics for violating the separation of religion and state) and the conquest of Istanbul by Sultan Mehmed II.8 The implication was clear: Erdoğan saw his rise to power as indicative of Islam’s ‘Second Conquest’ of Istanbul and Turkey.9 The conversion of Hagia Sophia – and subsequently of the Chora, using the same legal reasoning as in the earlier case – was evidence of Islam’s right of conquest over these sites, the city, and the state.
Here the issue of the display, or alternatively the suppression, of signs of other religious communities at mixed religious sites comes to the fore. Whether Atîk Ali Pasha effaced all signs of the Christian use of the Chora, as Underwood claims, or whether these remained in place until the 17th and 18th centuries when the regime of capitulations began to be perceived as a threat to Ottoman hegemony, it is evident in earlier iconoclasms – as in the attitudes of Erdoğan and his government towards Christian markers in Hagia Sophia and the Kariye Camii/Chora – that those who ‘own’ these sites deem it essential to erase, desacralize, or otherwise disempower the icons or objects of other communities. In doing so, they seek to monumentalize the Islamic identity of the site and of the state that controls it. Ironically in the instances of Hagia Sophia and the Chora, the earlier Kemalist museumization of both sites had already effectively desacralized their Christian and Islamic elements; the efforts of Erdoğan and his supporters have re-sacralized the Islamic elements, while leaving as touristic attractions whatever Christian iconology has not been covered or effaced. I will discuss, towards the end of this paper, the specific strategies by which Islamic practices have coexisted with the Christian iconography of the Chora. The efforts by Erdoğan and his supporters to hide the sight of Christian imagery from Muslim worshipers would seem to support Hayden’s contention that antagonistic agencies will struggle to efface or desacralize signs of the other’s presence, expunging, when sufficiently empowered, all salient evidence of the previous presence of that other. Nonetheless, antagonisms, even when powerful, are tempered by other considerations that may perpetuate forms of sharing or mixing. In the following pages, I will demonstrate, using examples drawn from my fieldwork in West Bank Palestine and North Macedonia, that the character and quality of mixing and sharing around shrines is not simply determined by inter-communal antagonism (where relevant to the case in question) but depends on local contexts and traditions as well as on intervention in the local context by agencies sited beyond the domains of the immediate populations involved. Identity markers, so much a concern to the Islamicist programme of Erdoğan and his allies, remain both central to the politics of inter-communal shrine practices and considerably more unfixed in their significations.
Bethlehem District, West Bank Palestine
Bethlehem District, to the south of Jerusalem, has long hosted a mixed population of Muslims and Christians. Although the proportion of the latter has dropped very considerably as a consequence of the movement of Muslim refugees into the region in the wake of the 1948 nakba (catastrophe) and the subsequent and prolonged emigration of Christian Palestinians out of their homeland, relations between the two faith communities has for the most part been amicable. Local calendrical festivals, nominally commemorating saints, prophets, and significant religious events but often timed to mark important moments in the agricultural cycle, have historically brought mixed crowds together around sites traditionally associated with those dates. Among these are celebrations at Nebi Musa (spring, a week before Orthodox Good Friday), the church of the Nativity (24–25 December, Latin Christmas), al-Khadr (early May, feast of St George), and Mar Elyas (1 August). Other sites have drawn individuals or family groups at less fixed times to seek health and/or blessings from thaumaturgic objects linked to sacred events or persons. The Milk Grotto and Rachel’s Tomb (both in Bethlehem and historically visited by Jews as well as, today, Christians and Muslims), like Bir es-Sayeda (in Beit Sahour), attract devotees, often women, seeking blessings for themselves and their children from powers associated with these sites. Mixing and sharing around such locations have diminished in recent years not only because of emigration and the decline of dependency on agricultural production but also, more saliently, because of intervention by religious and state authorities.
Mar Elyas, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem
On the 1st of August 1994, the day preceding the feast of Mar Elyas (the prophet Elijah), Muslims and both Orthodox and Latin Christians congregated in the olive groves around the Orthodox monastery of Mar Elyas (Fig. 8.1) to picnic, to listen and dance to oud (a fretless lute) and darbuka (a goblet-shaped drum), and to shop for children’s toys in the market set up along the adjoining roadside (Fig. 8.2).
Mar Elyas Monastery (West Bank), 1 August 1984
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Merchants outside Mar Elyas Monastery (West Bank), 1 August 1984
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Because the monastery, lacking any resident monks, had to be opened by the Jerusalem patriarchate for the occasion, access to the grounds and the chapel was only possible on those two days. People with whom I spoke outside the monastery told me they had variously come from Bethlehem, Beit Jala, al-Khadr, Dheisheh, and neighbouring villages to join friends, family, and neighbours for the pleasure of the event. A Muslim who had accompanied a Syrian Orthodox young woman to Mar Elyas relayed that “the religious difference doesn’t matter; we all come. It is for friendship and community as much as for religion.” Persons circulated from small group to small group, sharing food, drink, and gossip. Some of the attendees informed me that they did not go into the church at all but simply came on this day, as they always had, to be with their neighbours. One man said “we all come to be together around the saint’s place.”
Meanwhile, others pressed inside the chapel of the monastery. Having deposited olive oil, loaves of bread, and candles in front of icons or with attendant Orthodox monks, some joined the substantial queue of devotees waiting to place around their necks a chain, affixed to the monastery’s wall next to a large icon of St George and the Dragon, before kissing it three times and stepping through it (Fig. 8.3); parents helped infants and young children to replicate the process.
Chaining’ in front of the icon of St George, Mar Elyas Monastery (West Bank), 1 August 1984
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Many left the chapel immediately after their ritualized engagement with the chain, while others subsequently circled the room, offering obeisances to the iconostasis and other mounted icons.
I enquired of several persons why they had approached the chain in this manner. An Orthodox monk told me that the object had been found in a cave beneath the monastery and that it was popularly held to be one of the chains with which Jezebel had ordered Elijah bound (1 Kings 19): “Those who enchain themselves with it – around the neck and around the waist – bind themselves to the saint and make themselves one with him. All the sacrifices, like the oil for the lamps, the bread, the candles, express this self-dedication.” He went on to say, however, that this devotion, while spiritually correct, was actually misguided, for the chain had bound Christians during Muslim persecutions; the object came to be associated with the monastery because local Christians had hidden from their Muslim oppressors in the caves below. A young scout leader from the Beit Jala Orthodox troop, attending to help with the ceremonies, concurred that Elijah had been a great protector of the Christians during their persecutions. Pointing to an icon of Elijah killing the prophets of Baal, he told me, with a blithe disregard for scriptural chronology, that it represented Elijah slaughtering Jews and Muslims who persecuted the Christians. He added that the chain was particularly useful for alleviating insanity. Whereas the monk had stressed that local Christians effectively ‘chained’ themselves to the Orthodox Church through their devotions, the scout leader underscored Elijah’s role as a protector of local Christians rather than as a representative of the Church. He went on to characterize the Greek-dominated Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre as an enemy of Palestinian Christians, asserting that its domination of the Orthodox Church and of local Christians “feels like a foreign occupation.” Whereas both the monk and the scout see Muslims, at least historically, as among the enemies Elijah protects against, the scout’s discourse adds the Orthodox Church to the list of persecutors of local Christians.
Two Muslim women who had just stepped through the chain told me that they “come for the chain” and that the chain is linked to another at the Greek Orthodox monastery of St George, in the nearby Muslim village of al-Khadr. The object, they claimed, is not only potent in curing mental illness but also a number of other afflictions, including various sicknesses, bad luck, sinfulness, and even the evil eye. For them, the chain is powerful because “it is the same as” another in al-Khadr that possesses thaumaturgic qualities.10 The ethnographer and physician Tawfik Canaan described the role of chains in curing the mad at the monastery of St George. Until the early years of the 20th century, the afflicted were imprisoned in the narthex by chains fixed around their necks, drawn through windows into the chapel, and fastened to internal columns. They were kept that way until their conditions “got somewhat normal,” at which point they were released, being informed that the saint had pronounced them cured.11 A few years prior to the First World War, a sanatorium of 12 rooms was built adjoining the monastery; in each of its cells, a “chain [was] firmly fastened to the wall,” and a wire connecting the sanatorium to the chapel enabled “the healing power of the saint [to be] transmitted to the sick.”12 By the time of Canaan’s writing (1927) the Mandate authorities had refused to permit new patients to be sent to the church, and the chain thus became further disassociated from any particular practice or place, thus allowing it to stand in itself as a generalized thaumaturgic object, analogically reproducible at other holy sites.13
Two elements are in play in constituting Mar Elyas as a mixed or shared shrine. One is its historical designation as a site for festive gatherings. This is perpetuated by the social habitus of a mixed community that, acting on that tradition, recognizes and shapes itself as an entity. The second factor is the attraction of an object – here, the chain – to which I would apply the term ‘floating signifier’ insofar as its significance is variously manifested in the way people talk about it and through the meanings they attribute to it: the object itself ‘floats’ semantically, taking on meanings from the ways it is read by the people who engage with it.14 In the instance of the Mar Elyas festivities in 1994, there were few, if any, clashes of identity between Muslims and Christians because no incontestable act of power sought to stabilize or hegemonize the interpretation of the place and of the chain in a way that would exclude one or the other community from participation. Certainly latent antagonisms were evident in the interpretations provided by the monks and the scout leader with reference to historic persecutions of Christians by Muslims, as well as in the scout leader’s declaration of the foreign priesthood as enemy occupiers, but these were not acted on.
In the following years, particularly in the wake of the Oslo agreements, various interventions worked to render the events untenable. Undoubtedly changes in regional modes of production, demography, and education attenuated local commitment to tradition and traditional beliefs, but far more salient was increased intervention by the Israeli state – for instance, the establishment of a checkpoint between the engaging villages and the monastery, blocking participation by Muslims, scout groups, and all but elderly Christians on the feast days – in conjunction with the Orthodox Church’s sale of monastic lands to Israeli developers, including the olive groves where external festivities had taken place. The latent antagonism of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre to the local Christians (in my 1994 interviews, one told me that the local Christians, in engaging with the chain rather than the Orthodox liturgy, “were no better than Muslims”) had found means of coming to the fore. When I last visited, the monastery had been extensively refurbished, with both outdoor and indoor restaurants and a parking area for tour buses; previously accessible only on the day preceding and the day of the feast, it was now regularly opened for foreign pilgrims and tourists. The liturgies of the eve and of the feast day itself continued to be held in the monastery, but they had become ‘church’ functions in all senses of the word with only a smattering of old Christian Palestinian women in attendance, and that only for the liturgy on 2 August. The chain, though, was still there, and the resident monk informed me that Israeli tour guides talk all the tourists into using it. “The local Arabs go crazy for it,” he noted, adding that he rarely sees them as “those people can’t get to the place anymore.”
al-Khadr Village, South of Bethlehem
In the village of al-Khadr on the West Bank, Muslim and Christian Palestinians together celebrate the feast days of Khadr and St George over the 5th and 6th of May. The village, known during the Crusader period as Casale S. Georgii, later took the name of Khadr (‘the Green One’) because of that legendary immortal’s association with St George. Although historical record indicates the presence of Christian inhabitants as late as the mid-19th century, the village’s population is now exclusively Muslim. Despite this the monastery of St George, housing a single Orthodox monk, has long been sited in the middle of the village, overlooked by the recently modernized and enlarged al-Hamadiyya mosque.
The feasts of Khadr and of St George take place simultaneously in the village. In the past, I assumed that it was a neighbourly spirit of engaging with festivities linked to Christian calendrical events (as at Mar Elyas) that motivated Muslim inhabitants of al-Khadr to join Christians from neighbouring towns and villages in the streets and in the chapel of the monastery. I am now, however, inclined to think that the conjunction of Islamic and Christian celebrations is a sort of incomplete syncretism whereby some Muslims engage with Christian forms of worship because of the aura of generalized sacred power surrounding the time and place. Christians, while enjoying the carnival atmosphere in the streets, do not enter the mosque, and as we will see, some Muslims completely avoid the chapel, while of those who enter a number appear overtly sceptical of Christian iconology and ritual.
Outside the monastery and along the main street, individuals and families, among them a large contingent of children, gather on the 5th of May to buy food, toys, and musical instruments from merchants who are drawn to sites on feast days, many from Hebron to the south (2011; Fig. 8.4).
Feast Day outside the monastery of St George, al-Khadr (West Bank), 5 May 2011
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Within the narthex of the monastery’s chapel, long olive oil candles are sold to a mixed clientele, mainly women, who purchase them to light in the chapel as offerings to saints and other powers associated with the site (Fig. 8.5).
Locals purchasing candles outside the chapel of St George, al-Khadr (West Bank), 5 May 2011
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Monks from Jerusalem’s Brotherhood of the Holy Sepulchre as well as from the isolated desert monastery of Mar Saba oversee the setting without any intervention other than offering dismissive comments to me about the proceedings. A number of Palestinian priests from neighbouring towns such as Beit Sahour and Beit Jala are on hand to give blessings to individual attendees. Among these supplicants are a number of Muslim women who not only show reverence to the iconostasis (Fig. 8.6) but also join with Christian women to take blessings from priests via the laying of hands (Fig. 8.7).
In front of the iconostasis, chapel of St George, al-Khadr (West Bank), 5 May 2011
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Village Muslim being blessed by Orthodox priest, chapel of St George, al-Khadr (West Bank), 5 May 2011
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Adults place the collars of the several chains that hang on walls and columns throughout the chapel around the necks of their partners, their children, and themselves before stepping through, or having the others step through, the looped chain. This ritual seems to suffice in itself; prayers are not enunciated, and the only gesture is that of binding, encircling, and stepping through (Fig. 8.8).
Christian family ‘chaining’, chapel of St George, al-Khadr (West Bank), 5 May 2011
Photo: Glenn Bowman
A substantial number of local villagers sit in the courtyard outside the chapel, resting while observing those who go in. Occasionally, some of them enter the narthex and the chapel – in couples but not individually – and look, seemingly critically, at the altars, icons, and devotees (Fig. 8.9).
al-Khadr residents evaluating the side chapel, 5 May 2011
Photo: Glenn Bowman
When, however, the formal liturgy of the eve of the feast is presented, Muslims leave the church while Christians reverently gather around.
As with the festivities around Mar Elyas, those at al-Khadr bring together a mixed regional population reflecting both the historic and contemporary demographics of the Bethlehem District. Here, though, the Christian and Muslim attendees enact their difference in a more notable manner. This is not to say that they do not mix, but their mixing is marked – for the most part – by distinctions enunciated in the spaces they occupy and in their modes of deportment. There is, intriguingly, a degree of what one might call syncretism in the way some of the Muslim women engage with the Christian sacra inside the chapel. The monastery of St George, and particularly its chapel, has a long history of acceptance by Muslims and Christians alike as a place of healing, and more generally of blessing. Although the chapel is open by arrangement with the resident monk throughout the year, it is only on the festival dates that it is freely accessible to all. This is also when it is resonant with an aura of sacred power, manifested by the fervent devotions of attendant Christians. At that time, Muslim villagers are drawn in by curiosity and, for some, by a need for sacral assistance with issues, almost always related to their health or that of their children. Here, as with the Muslim women receiving the laying of hands from a priest, they draw on blessings in the same way local Christians do. This is severely frowned on by the monks from Jerusalem and Mar Saba who look on and comment, but for the priests – all Palestinian – their ministrations are a means of giving support to, and in turn perhaps receiving sympathy from, their neighbours.
Bir es-Sayeda, Beit Sahour, East of Bethlehem
In nearby Beit Sahour, a town with a population of approximately 12,500, of which 80 percent are Christian (Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant) and 20 percent Sunni Muslim, a small shrine enclosing a cistern lies alongside the central market (Fig. 8.10).
Bir es-Sayeda from the central market of Beit Sahour (West Bank), 1988
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Bir es-Sayeda, or the ‘Well of the Lady’, is a cistern alleged to have been dug by Jacob, Isaac’s son, and visited by the Virgin Mary during her family’s flight to Egypt. Its water is reputed to have been blessed by the Virgin, sightings of whom occurred in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1983; I first heard of these while attending that year’s Christmas Eve celebrations at the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. During the First Intifada, I spent time in Beit Sahour and collected materials pertaining to the well. The site, already reputed for the curative power of its waters, had in 1974 been purchased by the municipality from the Muslim family that owned it, and a small building, very much in the style of a maqām (a domed building associated with a Muslim saint or religious figure), was built over and around the cistern. Despite erecting a cross on the roof – something the town officials had promised not to do, according to the previous owners – the municipality declared the shrine municipal property and encouraged representatives of all the town’s religious communities to engage with it; thereafter, Catholic and Orthodox Christians held liturgies at the site. The shrine was open throughout the day, and residents of Beit Sahour, regardless of religious identity, visited to leave offerings and collect well water under the supervision of the municipally employed caretaker (Fig. 8.11).
Drawing water from the ‘well’, Beit Sahour (West Bank), 1988
Photo: Glenn Bowman
The miraculous power of the waters (which, frankly, made me, an unbeliever, quite ill when I sampled them) was contagiously associated with a sacred figure whose miraculous characteristics were recognized by all communities. The caretaker, when asked why the Marian shrine was owned by the municipality and not, as one would expect, by one of the Christian churches, indignantly replied, “we are here Muslim and Christian, and there are two Christian groups. The municipality builds for all the people, and the people all own and use the well. Hellas [enough].”
What made the site extraordinary, in the days leading up to and during the First Intifada, was its status as a sacred place owned by a mixed collectivity rather than by a single community welcoming or tolerating the presence of others. Here, as in Beit Sahour more generally at that time, the ‘floating signifier’ enabling the communion of the diverse elements of the town was the cultural and political notion of the community as ‘Palestinian’. Symptomatically, Desmond Tutu, Archbishop of Cape Town, flanked by Grand Mufti Sheikh Sa’ed Eddin al-Alami and Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, addressed a mixed crowd in Beit Sahour on Christmas Eve 1989, commending Sahourian solidarity in opposition to occupation. When I initially wrote of Bir es-Sayeda in 1993, I took my title – “Nationalizing the Sacred” – from a Muslim schoolteacher’s insistence that “we must nationalize our beliefs, should rebuild our customs so they reflect our national life.”15 This subsumption of diverse cultural traits and identities within an overarching national category is not unlike what Kemal Atatürk attempted in Istanbul. Beit Sahour’s subsequent development, like Turkey’s, succumbed, however, to identity politics.
Two significant events marked the terminal decline of Bir es-Sayeda as an inter-communal, ‘national’ shrine. One was the 1994 election of a recent Orthodox returnee from Kuwait to the chairmanship of the Bir es-Sayeda Committee. He insisted that the committee had never had Muslim members, even though I had, in 1988, met two appointed as representatives of major family groups in the town. According to him, the shrine was, and always had been, exclusively Christian. He projected his experience of official Muslim suppression of Christians in Kuwait onto the situation of Christians in Palestine: “We are becoming a minority; things are getting worse between us. We cannot sustain each other … I am first Christian, then Palestinian.”16 Although I have been unable to uncover the machinations that effected the exclusion of Muslim representation from the committee, the new chairman was adamant that, while “the Muslims want to be represented … it is inconceivable – unacceptable – that we be concerned with the issues of the mosque.”17 The other event, occurring in the same year, was the appointment of an American-trained Jordanian national to the priesthood of Beit Sahour’s Catholic church. One of his first moves was refusing to continue the tradition of offering Mass in the shrine:
I won’t give masses in Bir es-Sayeda, even though I have the right to, because it smacks of superstition. I’ve told the people that if they want to pray there, they can go and do so, but they don’t need a priest.18
The priest’s ‘textualist’ hostility to folk religion was an import from his doctoral training in theology, in the same way that the new chairman’s antagonism to Muslims was brought in from Kuwait. Neither acknowledged the cultural context that made Bir es-Sayeda the anomaly that it was, and both contributed to the formal demise of its inter-communalism. After the Catholic withdrawal from offering Mass in the shrine, the only formal worship there was Orthodox; Beit Sahour’s mosque had never organized collective prayer in the shrine, possibly because of the precedent set by Caliph Omar ibn Khattab at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 637. By 2007 people in authority in the town – whether in the Municipal Building, the Orthodox or Catholic churches, or the mosque – would reply to my queries about its ownership with a generic answer, best encapsulated by one’s response that “[t]he Greek Church owns absolutely everything. They always have owned everything and they don’t (and never have) shared anything with anyone.”19 The municipality’s website does not state the case as strongly – perhaps because it is designed for an international touristic audience – but it does erase the powerful moment when the town transcended identitarianism:
The Virgin Mary Well … is a religious endowment belonging to the whole city and the Municipality has built a shrine over the cistern expressly for the use of Christians of all denominations. It is also highly revered by many Muslims. Inside, the walls are covered with icons and paintings of Christian subjects given by worshippers; but randomly scattered amongst these, there is an abundance of other gifts and pictures.20
Nonetheless, in 2007 as well as during subsequent visits up until the summer of 2018, I observed schoolchildren of all affiliations coming in to light candles and pray for success on their examinations. Adults – all women – similarly approached the altar and the cistern with gifts of oil and candles and with prayers they would not discuss with me. A complex web of inter-communal interactions remained in place, involving, for instance, a Muslim woman cleaning the shrine while a Christian woman did the same for the mosque.
North Macedonia
Two sites in North Macedonia (also known as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) are relevant to this investigation. Unlike the Palestinian instances, two of which centre around monasteries and another around an indeterminate shrine associated with a Christian figure, the two loci in the southern Balkans are what Frederick Hasluck termed ‘ambiguous sanctuaries’ where the histories of the sites render their meanings unfixed and thus contestable.21 The intercommunal choreographies engaged in by the communities surrounding both Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā and Husamedin Paša Mosque/St Elijah’s Church foreground aspects of sharing, tolerance and antagonism that did not appear in the West Bank cases.
Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā, Makedonski Brod, Region of Southwestern Macedonia
The Macedonian Orthodox church of Sveti Nikola (St Nicholas) lies on the outskirts of Makedonski Brod. This rural municipality of approximately 6,000 Christians is itself located in the Kičevo municipality of southwestern Macedonia, a rural district characterized by a rich array of unmixed Muslim (predominantly Sufi) and Christian villages. The building is small and square (6.5 metre), with an apse, clearly a later addition, on its southern wall; there is no cross on the roof, although one is incised into the outer wall of that apse (Fig. 8.12).
View of the southern face of Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā, Makedonski Brod (southwestern Macedonia), 5 May 2006
Photo: Glenn Bowman
The building’s orientation, rather than being east-west as is nearly universal in churches, is north-south. Within the chapel, displaced to the west of the central axis, is a raised structure, approximately two metres by three-quarters of a metre and covered with a simple cloth of green silk.
These incongruities can be explained by the building’s history. It is the only remaining element of a Bektashi tekke (a Sufi gathering place) that was constructed soon after the arrival of the Ottoman Turks in the southern Balkans in the mid-14th century. With the Serbian conquest of the region in the late 19th century and the resulting displacement of Makedonski Brod’s majority- Muslim population, the türbe (mausoleum) of the tekke was converted to a church, with the addition of the apse. The remainder of the tekke disappeared. After the First World War, and with the construction of a larger church in the centre of town, Sveti Nikola ceased to serve as a church – though apparently both Christians and Muslims from the region continued to visit the site. During the socialist period, it fell into ruin, but in the 1980s, after the death of Tito, the Islamic community moved to revitalize it as a mosque, thus prompting the district’s Orthodox metropolitan to restore it as a Christian site. It was sanctified in 1994 amidst the fervour of post-socialist nationalism.
The caretaker who lives in an adjoining building opens the shrine for visits throughout the year. Unusually for a Christian site, the interior stone-slab floor is covered – except on the occasion of the feast days of St George (5th and 6th of May) – with multiple overlapping carpets, some clearly Islamic prayer rugs. The iconostasis is dense with relatively crude icons of saints, and the rest of the shrine’s walls are covered with Christian icons, interspersed not only with Sufi images of Mecca, Ali, and Hussein (most likely of Shia origin) but also with occasional kitsch elements, such as a picture of a little girl watering flowers and a scarf with an image of a cartoon ghost, draped over an icon of the Virgin and Child (!). The green cloth bedecking the raised platform is itself covered with flowers, hand-embroidered cloth, paper money, green ox-tallow candles, and Muslim prayer beads (sibha), along with iconic representations of St Nicholas and St George. Clustered around the platform, as well as next to the shrine’s door, are gifts of olive oil, sweets, candles, and items of clothing.
Two sets of traditions sanctify the site – Muslim and Christian – reflecting the two communities that revere it. The Muslims who attend are aligned variously with the area’s numerous Sufi sects. When asked about the shrine, local Christians related stories of how, “in the past,” an old bearded man saved the townspeople from plague by having them kill an ox, cut its hide into strips, link them together, and mark out for dedication to a monastery as much land as could be contained within the resultant rope. The old man – Sveti Nikola – is believed to lie buried beneath the raised platform within the church. Visiting Muslims told exactly the same story, except in their version the old man was Hidr Bābā, a Bektashi saint whose tomb lies within the former turbe. Despite this discrepancy, relations between the Christians who ‘own’ the site and visiting Muslims are more than cordial. The quality of this relationship and the arrangements that perpetuate it were evident during the preparations for the 2006 feast day of St Nicholas and the events that followed.
Preparations preceding the 5th of May involve hiding signs of the Muslim presence and rendering the site more like an Orthodox church: the carpets are taken up, and the various Muslim images and objects are hidden from the view of visitors – ironically, being moved to the sanctuary, behind the iconostasis. The green ‘Muslim’ candles and the sibhah are removed from the ‘tomb’ of St Nicholas and replaced with white ‘Christian’ candles, red eggs, and a smaller set of Christian prayer beads. The site, thus ‘Christianized’, is ready for the hundreds of visitors – all but a few Christian – who arrive throughout the 5th and the following day. At dawn on the 7th, the caretaker, her son, and a number of men associated with the town’s main church ‘return’ the site to its normal mixed state. The carpets are carefully re-laid, and the Islamic images are brought out from the iconostasis and restored to their previous locations. Intense discussion takes place around where exactly the image of Ali with his sword, Zulfiqar, should be mounted and how the cloth that partially covers it should be draped (Fig. 8.13).
Remounting the painting of Ali with his sword Zulfiqar, Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā, Makedonski Brod (southwestern Macedonia), 7 May 2006. Note the displaced, cloth-covered ‘tomb’ of St Nicholas/Hidr Bābā at bottom left
Photo: Glenn Bowman
The sibhah are replaced on the platform, and the green tallow candles are returned and lit because “they are coming and must be made to feel at home.”22
Making Muslims from the surrounding villages feel ‘at home’ is far less a matter of welcoming them into the Christian community than of returning the site at which they mix with Christians to the same condition as that with which they are familiar. On the morning of the feast day, a delegation led by the head of one of Kičevo’s Sufi orders accessed the shrine and, insisting on the exclusion of the caretaker and the priest, investigated the interior to make sure that the signs of Islamic presence had been respectfully treated. One suspects that they were aware of, and approved of, the mounting of the Muslim images (which had been stored facing the wall in the sanctuary during preparations for the feast) amidst the Christian icons in the holiest section of the church (Fig. 8.14).
Sufi/Shia images amidst the Christian icons in the sanctuary, Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā, Makedonski Brod (southwestern Macedonia), 5 May 2006
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Satisfied with their investigation, the delegates allowed the caretaker and others in and prayed within the still ‘Christianized’ shrine, around the place where Hidr Bābā’s tomb had been located until its decentring during the 1994 reworking of the site (Fig. 8.15).
A delegation from the Kičevo municipality praying to the original site of Hidr Bābā’s turbe, Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā, Makedonski Brod (southwestern Macedonia), 6 May 2006
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Perhaps primary among the motives for welcoming Muslims to the Makedonski Brod shrine is the fact that, as Dragina the elderly caretaker says, “the others leave generous gifts – not only objects but also cash – and we benefit from it.”23 Considerable cash contributions from the previous months were counted up by the priest and members of the ‘church committee’ on the evening of the 5th, and on the afternoon of the 6th gifts given to the shrine (largely clothing and decorative handiwork) were auctioned off to an enthusiastic and exclusively Christian crowd (Fig. 8.16).
Auctioning of offerings, Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā, Makedonski Brod (southwestern Macedonia), 6 May 2006
Photo: Glenn Bowman
The money received went to funding the town’s central Orthodox church, and, as several persons told me, the vast majority of cash and gifts came from Muslim visitors to the shrine.
Regardless of these considerations, the close temporal and spatial proximity of Christians and Muslims around Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā has led to some ‘bleeding’ of practices. This bleeding might be simply contiguous confusion or might represent something bordering on syncretism. After the 6th, Muslims, mostly Sufi but occasionally Sunni, came back to the shrine, offering gifts and devotions. In contrast to the historic corrective performed by the Kičevo Sufis in praying to where the tomb of Hidr Bābā had once been, Muslim devotees over the following days not only prayed around the displaced edifice but, in several cases, towards the iconostasis itself (Fig. 8.17).
Sufis praying towards the iconostasis, Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā, Makedonski Brod (southwestern Macedonia), 7 May 2006
Photo: Glenn Bowman
More, perhaps, than an effect of confusion caused by the layout of the shrine, this practice may be a consequence of what Marcel Mauss termed ‘prestigious imitation’ whereby a person “imitates actions which have succeeded and which he has seen successfully performed by people in whom he has confidence.”24 Confidence, here, might be a tenuous thing to be tested. Dragina, the elderly caretaker, asked a visiting dervish to pass sibhah over her middle-aged son in order to assess whether his failure to marry resulted from a curse. These examples are not yet manifestations of syncretism but rather demonstrate pragmatic borrowings that might become such if proven efficacious and adopted by others who repeat them over time.
Husamedin Paša Mosque/St Elijah’s Church, Štip, District of Eastern Macedonia
There are few, if any, instances of Christians worshiping in mosques. Insofar as Islam historically follows Christianity and, in Islamic thought, corrects and clarifies Christian interpretations of divine and prophetic messages, Muslims can attend Christian sites that, though manifesting an imperfectly understood divine revelation, are nonetheless informed by revelation. For Christians, however, Islam is a heresy or deviancy, and attendance at a Muslim site is effectively blasphemous. As Hasluck pointed out, “a mosque, unless it has been (or is thought to have been) a church is rarely, if ever, taken over as a church by the Orthodox.”25 Hence, in the case of Sveti Nikola discussed above, the late 19th-century Serbian transformation of the turbe into an Orthodox church proceeded because of legends that the tekke had in fact been built over the site of a Christian church complex.
In Štip, to the east of Makedonski Brod, the near derelict remains of the former central mosque, built in the early 16th century, stand on high ground above the town of 45,100 inhabitants (Fig. 8.18).
Husamedin Paša Mosque/St Elijah’s Church, Štip (eastern Macedonia), 4 May 2006
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Despite significant damage inflicted during the Balkan Wars (1912–13), the mosque served the town’s minority-Muslim population until 1945 when it was closed. At that time, the local Halveti Sufi residents began to celebrate the feast of Ashura next to the mosque, where the turbe of Medin Bābā stands. In 1953, the mosque reopened as a gallery space for the Štip Museum, but three years later that, too, closed, leaving the building empty. Through the intervention of the ethnic-nationalist party the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE), in 1992 the local Orthodox Church gained access to the mosque and began celebrating the feast of the prophet Elijah therein, with icons set in the mihrab and a communal meal following the liturgy. Holding this celebration at the site was based on the idea – for which there is no firm evidence – that the original mosque had been built over an Orthodox church. Throughout the year, Christians inscribed crosses on the front of the building and burned candles on the porch around its entryway. It had become a Christian site.
By 2005 the Islamic community had been revitalized by substantial finan- cial contributions from diasporic Štip Muslims in Turkey as well as other Islamic sources, and projects were undertaken both to restore the only mosque still operative in the town and to build an Islamic school. Muslim activists discussed the desirability of restoring the Husamedin Paša to its previous eminence as Štip’s central mosque. They began referring to the building as the Husamedin Paša Mosque; prior to this, and as recently as May 2006, local Muslims themselves tended to refer to the mosque as St Elijah’s Church. One activist in this movement told me that the Christian celebrations as they were currently being carried out were “inappropriate for a place of worship.” The year before, he and a friend had walked by during the August feast and, afraid to enter the mosque, had seen through the door “Christians eating and drinking rakia [a distilled fruit alcohol] around a table they’d set up in the middle.”26 Despite his sense of the mosque’s desecration, he asserted that upon its reconversion to “what it should be” he would “share it with Christians on the day they want to use it.”
My research colleague Elizabeta Koneska and I interviewed a priest from the town’s main church, Sveti Nikola, who insisted that the mosque had been built over the foundations of a destroyed church, finding evidence for this in the ostensibly cruciform shape of the mosque. (In fact, the mosque is not cruciform but square, as is typical of early 16th-century Ottoman sacral architecture.) The priest told us that
according to the ground plan, this is a church, but when the
Osmanli [Ottoman] Turks came, they turned it into a mosque. The
foundation is still a church. We want to make it a church
again, but from Skopje they would not give us permission.
Otherwise, it would have been a church by now … Now we
don’t know what it is any longer: neither one nor the other.27
For him, the mosque is no more than a historical excrescence occluding access to the real holy site beneath it. The worship that takes place there during the August feast of Elijah proceeds as though the Muslim intervention was invisible:
During the ceremony, a prayer is sung, a prosphora [a small loaf of bread stamped with a sacred image] is raised in the air, and everything takes place inside … Outside, the anointment takes place, and on the second day, in the morning, a liturgy is sung in the church.28
Elizabeta had visited Štip in February 2006 to observe the feast of Ashura and to maintain contact with the Macedonian-speaking Roma community that constitutes the largest body of Muslims in the otherwise largely Christian city. Aware that we would be working together in the spring on mixed shrines, Elizabeta asked the Štip Museum for permission to examine the interior of the mosque and was lent a copy of the key it held in its possession. During the preparations for the Ashura feast, Elizabeta entered the mosque and was followed by a number of Halveti Muslims. Having gained access, the Sufis, who as a community had not been allowed inside the mosque since its closure in 1945, removed accreted rubble from the space and swept, washed, and laid carpets on the floor – all while leaving the Orthodox ritual materials, including icons of Elijah, in place in the niche in which they were stored between feasts. They then, with members of a Sunni organization called the Islamic Religious Community of Štip, held a namaz (prayer) in the mosque (Fig. 8.19).
Ashura meal, Husamedin Paša Mosque/St Elijah’s Church, Štip (eastern Macedonia), 10 February 2006
Photo: Elizabeta Koneska
After the Sunnis departed, the Halveti held their Ashura feast in the mosque.
Subsequently, the key to the building, normally kept by the curator of the Štip Museum, was found to have gone missing. Little was thought of this until the eve of the feast of the prophet Elijah (1 August 2006) when, as local Christians gathered for the two-day celebrations and began setting up their booths for selling foodstuffs and candles, it was discovered that a second lock had been welded to the doors of the mosque. Late in the afternoon, as the priests from Sveti Nikola arrived to prepare the interior of the mosque for the Panagia (in which a loaf on a plate is elevated in honour of the Virgin Mary before being shared among participants) and for the festive liturgy, it became evident that the second lock had been mounted by the Islamic Religious Community and that no one present had a key (Fig. 8.20).
Second lock on the door of Husamedin Paša Mosque/St Elijah’s Church, Štip (eastern Macedonia), 1 August 2006
Photo: Glenn Bowman
The Muslim organization, when contacted, refused to remove the lock, claiming that the site was a mosque and theirs. Amidst muted mutterings and assertions that the site had been used for the feast since time immemorial, the Panagia and the anointing were held on the portico while local people leaned candles against the doors and piled small gifts of cloth and flowers in front of them (Fig. 8.21).
Christians outside the locked church on the feast of the prophet Elijah, Husamedin Paša Mosque/St Elijah’s Church, Štip (eastern Macedonia), 2 August 2006
Photo: Glenn Bowman
Throughout the evening and over the following day, locals came, prayed, and left dismayed and angry.
Conclusion: Kariye Camii/Chora, Istanbul
The varied modalities of inter-communal coexistence around the sacred sites examined above demonstrate that the nature and quality of mixing or sharing are dependent on a number of variables, both historic and contemporaneous. Returning to the Kariye Camii/Chora, I stress that the site and its context differ significantly from the others heretofore discussed. Most evident is the fact that, in its modality as a holy place, it has never been a shared or mixed site; the only time it can be seen to have been ‘mixed’ was during its secular period as a museum when, unless surreptitiously, no worship took place. The sites examined above have shown us, however, that the communities drawn to shared sites may be attracted to the very same elements, albeit differently interpreted: the chain at Mar Elyas, the well at Bir es-Sayeda, and the turbe at Sveti Nikola/Hidr Bābā. At other locales, the communities are attracted to aspects that are differently understood yet exist contiguously, as at al-Khadr, where the feast date and the place overlap, and as at the site of Husamedin Paša Mosque/St Elijah’s Church.
Between 1945 and 2020, the Chora was desacralized through its conversion into a museum. Its mosque elements, like those of its earlier existence as a church, were framed as signs of the heritage of the nation, signs appropriate for celebration and touristic appreciation but not devotion – although, intriguingly, in 2006 while Hagia Sophia was still a museum, a dedicated prayer room for employees was opened there, perhaps as the first step in diluting the site’s secularity. Erdoğan’s programme to reassert the Islamic identity of the state, which he termed a ‘Second Conquest’ both in the inaugural prayer within the re-sanctified Hagia Sofia as well as in subsequent interviews, involved not only building new mosques (most notably Istanbul’s grandiose Çamlıca Mosque) but also re-sanctifying former mosques that had been converted to museums. ‘Conquest’ in the contemporary context, however, means something rather different than it did during the original Ottoman expansion, when a defeated population had to be shown incontrovertibly that its armies, and its god, were powerless. The case of the cathedral of St Sophia in Nicosia, Cyprus, exemplifies what happened, historically, when a resisting city was taken (Fig. 8.22).
Interior of the cathedral of St Sophia, Nicosia (Cyprus), 8 November 2009
Photo: Glenn Bowman
After the besieged city had fallen to the forces of Lala Mustafa Pasha in 1570, this central cathedral was stormed by troops who killed many sheltering inside, including the bishop. Next, according to the eyewitness Angelo Calepio,
the Turks started clearing out the Latin cathedral of St Sophia. They removed the choir, destroyed the altar and other parts and arranged the interior according to their own style. On the following Friday, 15th September 1570, Lala Mustafa Pasha went there, accompanied by his train, to worship god and to offer him his thanks for such an important victory.29
Tuncer Bağışkan notes also that a mihrab, minbar, and kürsü were added and that “the interior faces of the walls were whitewashed, and two minarets, 49 metres high, were constructed.”30 In this case, Hayden’s reading of antagonism is appropriate: the victorious Ottomans wanted to leave behind no sign of a former Christian presence that might inspire the defeated to resist.
In the instance of the Chora, as well as of Hagia Sophia, the intended audience of the reconversion process is not God and a recently subordinated population but Erdoğan’s institutional backers, the Muslim Turkish electorate and, less significantly, international agencies concerned with human rights and tourism. In this sense, the site has two audiences, and two communities of potential users – one Turkish and one international – and can thus be considered mixed. For Turkish Muslims, the place is seen to be a Muslim site of worship and a monument to Islamic Turkey’s victory over secularism and Western colonialism. Erdoğan’s (currently faltering) popularity and his populist hold on power depend on the acceptance of this assertion. For the international audience, which Erdoğan publicly claims to dismiss, the UNESCO-recognized heritage of the 4th-century Chora Church must remain protected and open to the gaze of global tourism. Pleasing both audiences is not an easy task.
The current arrangement of the Kariye Camii/Chora seeks to overcome this difficulty without expelling one or the other party, namely, through creating a spatial and temporal separation not unlike that of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre.31 At the Chora, the Christian iconography, which densely covers the walls and ceiling spaces of much of the building, remains in place insofar as it does not intrude on the explicitly sacral space and time of Muslim prayers. In a sense this covertly recognizes the status quo of much of the building, which, in all but name, continues to function outside of prayer times as a museum. Images remain in the parekklesion and the two narthexes because these do not empower Christians in any bid to ‘take back’ the church. Indeed, the relatively insignificant power of the minority-Christian inhabitants of Istanbul, and of Turkey overall, effectively negates the threat of their using the remaining images as pretexts for re-sacralizing the building, while Christian antipathy to praying at a Muslim holy site further reduces the danger. All but the most militant Islamists are likely to accept as a fait accompli the legal transformation of the building into a mosque and to disregard the decorated sectors of the building on their way to the naos for prayers. The closure of the mosque to tourists during times of prayer reduces the chance of difficult encounters.
As at Hagia Sophia, the problem of juggling the concerns of both audiences arises when Christian imagery interferes with Muslim observances in the mosque’s formal place of prayer. Muslims pray towards Mecca following the five ezân or calls to prayer. Restricted access for tourists and others not praying during these times resolves the issue of juxtaposition, but the presence of Christian imagery – particularly that asserting Jesus’s status as more than a prophet – in the sightline of Muslims facing towards Mecca during prayer is anathema. In Hagia Sophia, an elaborate system of veiling works to cover the images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary during prayers. The issue is more easily resolved in the Chora. The naos, the section of the church where the liturgy was performed and where now the Mecca-oriented mihrab is sited, has preserved
its 14th-century marble revetments almost in their entirety but very little of its mosaics. The vaults and upper walls of the church were probably decorated with the most important scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin, the so-called Dodekaorton, or Twelve Feast Cycle, as was standard in a Byzantine church, along with a bust of Christ in the dome and the Virgin enthroned in the apse. Of these, only the Koimesis, or Dormition of the Virgin, survives [on the rear wall], along with standing figures of Christ and the Virgin on the piers to either side of the entrance to the bema.32
The paucity of iconography in the naos (Fig. 8.23) means that, for the time being, the images that remain are not seen to disturb the sanctity of prayers. Moreover, the still-extant images of Jesus and his mother – recognized figures in Muslim theology – make no explicit claims concerning the Godhead.
View of the naos looking eastward, Chora Church/Kariye Camii, Istanbul
Photo: Robert G. Ousterhout, The Art of the Kariye Camii (London, 2002), p. 13
There is, at present, a truce between two of the shrine’s audiences, one – namely, worshipers and visitors – internal to the Kariye Camii/Chora, and the other – namely, an Islamist state and electorate facing a largely secular body of institutions and communities both within and beyond Turkey – external to it. At issue, and dependent on the interplay of those two audiences, is the question of whether the rather delicate arrangement of mutual non-interference between Muslim worshipers and ‘secular’ visitors is sufficiently stable to continue; the agreement to keep Islamic prayer times and places sacrosanct in return for allowing appropriate non-intervening visits by scholars and tourists can easily be retracted, resulting in moves to close the site to all but Muslim worshipers and possibly to cover up or even remove the Christian iconography. Such a development might be sparked either by perceived clashes between worshipers and visitors at the site or by activities focussed on the shrine and externally organized by institutions or individuals. Erdoğan’s currently waning popularity might lead him to play the Islamization card more aggressively, generating populist support by attacking ‘European-Christian’ interference in Turkish affairs and using the mosques as examples. Alternatively, the organizations that worked with him to re-sanctify Kemalist ‘museums’ may in the future decide that his programme has proven inadequate and work to force the transformation towards completion. Sadly, at present, ‘external’ opposition to such efforts is unlikely to do more than further fuel Islamist populism.
The Kariye Camii/Chora is an anomaly when compared with the mixed or shared shrines examined in this paper. At different moments in its history, it has been an exclusive shrine for two Abrahamic religions, a secular museum celebrating the heritage of a mixed nation, and, most recently, a mixed site for both secular and religious followings. Those various modalities reflect the richness of its appeal and the complexities of the attendant choreographies. Set alongside, or against, the other sites addressed here, it displays yet further ways of living in the presence of the other.
Bibliography
Albera, Dionigi. “‘Why are you mixing what cannot be mixed?’ Shared Devotions in the Monotheisms,” History and Anthropology 19/1 (2008), 37–59.
Bağışkan, Tuncer. Ottoman, Islamic and Islamised Monuments in Cyprus, translated by Thomas Sinclair. Nicosia, 2009.
Bowman, Glenn. “Nationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories,” Man, n.s. 28/3 (1993), 431–460.
Bowman, Glenn. “Orthodox-Muslim Interactions at ‘Mixed Shrines’ in Macedonia,” in Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, edited by Chris Hann, and Hermann Goltz, pp. 195–219. Berkeley, Calif., 2010.
Bowman, Glenn. “In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav’n’: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre,” History and Anthropology 32/3 (2011), 371–399.
Bowman, Glenn. “Nationalizing and Denationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories,” in Sacred Space in Israel and Palestine: Religion and Politics, edited by Yitzhak Reiter, Marshall J. Breger, and Leonard Hammer, pp. 195–227. New York, 2012.
Canaan, Tawfik. Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine. London, 1927.
Hasluck, Frederick. “Ambiguous Sanctuaries and Bektashi Propaganda,” Annual of the British School at Athens 20 (1914), 94–119.
Hasluck, Frederick. Christianity and Islam Under the Sultans, vol. 1. 1929; repr. Istanbul, 2000.
Hayden, Robert. “Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans,” Current Anthropology 43/2 (2002), 205–231.
Hoff, Anne-Christine. “Turkish Imperialism: Erdoğan’s ‘Second Conquest’ of the Christians,” Middle East Quarterly 28/4 (2021), 1–6.
Karakas, Cemal. Turkey: Islam and Laicism Between the Interests of State, Politics, and Society. Peace Institute Frankfurt Reports no. 78, translated by Kersten Horn. Frankfurt am Main, 2007.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. New York, 1987.
Mauss, Marcel. “Body Techniques,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, pp. 101–102. 1950; repr. London, 1979.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, N.J., 2002.
Ousterhout, Robert, G. The Art of the Kariye Camii. Istanbul/London, 2002.
Ousterhout, Robert, G. “The Kariye Camii: An Introduction,” in Restoring Byzantium: The Kariye Camii in Istanbul and the Byzantine Institute Restoration, pp. 5–14. New York, 2004.
Tanyeri-Erdemir, Tuğba. “Reconversion of Istanbul’s Byzantine Monuments Emboldens Religious Extremism,” in Ahval. Available at http://ahval.co/en-92080. Accessed 25 Aug 2021.
Underwood, Paul A. “First Preliminary Report on the Restoration of the Frescoes in the Kariye Camii at Istanbul by the Byzantine Institute 1952–1954,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 9/10 (1956), 253–288.
Research for this paper was carried out with support from the Council for British Research in the Levant, the British Academy, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Robert Hayden, “Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans,” Current Anthropology 43/2 (2002), 205–31.
Dionigi Albera, “‘Why are you mixing what cannot be mixed?’ Shared Devotions in the Monotheisms,” History and Anthropology 19/1 (2008), 37–59, esp. 54–55.
Paul A. Underwood, “First Preliminary Report on the Restoration of the Frescoes in the Kariye Camii at Istanbul by the Byzantine Institute 1952–1954,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 9/10 (1956), 253–88, esp. 259.
Robert G. Ousterhout, The Art of the Kariye Camii (Istanbul/London, 2002), p. 15.
Ibid.
Yael Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, N.J., 2002).
Cemal Karakas, Turkey: Islam and Laicism Between the Interests of State, Politics, and Society. Peace Institute Frankfurt Reports no. 78, trans. Kersten Horn (Frankfurt am Main, 2007).
Tuğba Tanyeri-Erdemir, “Reconversion of Istanbul’s Byzantine Monuments Emboldens Religious Extremism,” in Ahval. Available at http://ahval.co/en-92080. Accessed 25 Aug 2021.
Anne-Christine Hoff, “Turkish Imperialism: Erdoğan’s ‘Second Conquest’ of the Christians,” Middle East Quarterly 28/4 (2021), 1–6.
Neither the two women, nor other Muslim attendees with whom I spoke, mentioned the association of the legendary Muslim figure of al-Khadr with the prophet Elijah as well as with St George.
Tawfik Canaan, Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (London, 1927), p. 124.
Ibid.
Interestingly, Canaan mentions earlier that the church was internationally famed because of the healing powers of a stone onto which drops of communion wine had been dropped, although he does not link that legend with the idea that the place itself was imbued with a contagious power to heal. Ibid., pp. 58–59.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (New York, 1987), p. 63.
Glenn Bowman, “Nationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli- Occupied Territories,” Man, n.s. 28/3 (1993), 431–60, esp. 449.
Glenn Bowman, “Nationalizing and Denationalizing the Sacred: Shrines and Shifting Identities in the Israeli-Occupied Territories,” in Sacred Space in Israel and Palestine: Religion and Politics, ed. Yitzhak Reiter, Marshall J. Breger, and Leonard Hammer (New York, 2012). pp. 195–27, esp. 216.
Ibid.
Bowman, “Nationalizing and Denationalizing the Sacred,” p. 217.
Ibid.
Available at https://beitsahour.ps/2018/07/31/the-virgin-mary-well/. Accessed 25 Aug 2021.
Frederick Hasluck, “Ambiguous Sanctuaries and Bektashi Propaganda,” Annual of the British School at Athens 20 (1914), 94–119.
Glenn Bowman, “Orthodox-Muslim Interactions at ‘Mixed Shrines’ in Macedonia,” in Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective, ed. Chris Hann, and Hermann Goltz (Berkeley, 2010), pp. 195–219, esp. 170.
Ibid.
Marcel Mauss, “Body Techniques,” in Sociology and Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (1950; repr. London, 1979), pp. 101–02.
Frederick Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans (1929; repr. Istanbul, 2000), 1:104.
Interview 4 May 2006.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Tuncer Bağışkan, Ottoman, Islamic and Islamised Monuments in Cyprus, trans. Thomas Sinclair (Nicosia, 2009), p. 130.
Ibid, p. 129.
Glenn Bowman, “‘In Dubious Battle on the Plains of Heav’n’: The Politics of Possession in Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre,” History and Anthropology 32/3 (2011), 371–99.
Robert G. Ousterhout, “The Kariye Camii: An Introduction,” in Restoring Byzantium: The Kariye Camii in Istanbul and the Byzantine Institute Restoration, exh. cat., ed. Holger A. Klein, and Robert G. Ousterhout (New York, 2004), pp. 8–9.