Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe

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© Copyrighted Materialww

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introduction: crossing the BordersJohn Eade and Mario Katić

Background

This volume has emerged from a conference held at Zadar, Croatia, in 2012, which brought together those researching religion, politics, tourism and pilgrimage from both eastern and western europe. the conference was born out of our desire to contribute to the breakdown of boundaries and stereotypes that have been shaped by both linguistic and disciplinary divisions. here, we bring together scholars from very different nations across eastern europe to challenge those divisions through explorations of the relationship between pilgrimage, politics and place-making. We see eastern europe as an ideal area for exploring the relationship between religion and politics, and by focusing particularly on pilgrimage sites – religious and secular, old and new, as well as those which are being de-constructed. We can also study this relationship through the links between past and present. the sites we have chosen are located within nations whose histories are characterized by dramatic political, economic and social change, accompanied in many cases by traumatic conflict and shifting borders. Yet, as the deep divisions of twentieth-century europe soften, we can now challenge long-standing assumptions about the other – whether this be other nations, religions, or other regions within a politically changing europe, such as ‘eastern europe’, the ‘Balkans’ or the ‘Baltic states’.

We are focusing, after all, on an area where empires unravelled with unexpected speed during the early twentieth century. the revision of territorial boundaries after the First World War had a crucial impact on central and eastern europe leading to antagonisms which encouraged the next, even more global conflagration in 1939. the defeat of nazi germany and its allies resulted in another spate of boundary movement as stalin moved Poland’s borders westwards and supported the creation of a new nation – the german democratic republic – at the oder-neisse line. the closing of the ‘iron curtain’ and the creation of the Berlin Wall were two more radical changes which imposed a sharp division between european countries, which had been linked by centuries of economic and cultural exchange. Not surprisingly, the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 visually signified the more general collapse of the iron curtain and socialist political, economic and ideological structures. the eastwards expansion of the european union, involving the formal entry of the ‘A8’ countries in 2004, Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, and Croatia in 2013, encouraged young people, in particular, to migrate to the West, at least for a time (see Burrell 2009, Black et al. 2010). Membership of the European

© John Eade and Mario Katić and the contributors (2014)From John Eade and Mario Katić (eds), Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe: Crossing the Borders,

published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472415929



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Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe2

union was not seen as an unmixed blessing by some of these migrants and those remaining in their countries of origin (see Eade and Valkanova 2009).

There are encouraging signs that the flows of people, capital, goods, information and images across European borders are not just one way. In the academic sector, West european scholars are building networks with east european colleagues, encouraged by eu funding of the erasmus exchange scheme and various research programmes. research centres in former socialist countries, such as the max Planck institute for social anthropology at halle/saale, have also contributed to this breaking-down of intellectual boundaries. however, chris hann, the max Planck institute’s founding director, warns us against painting too rosy a picture of change and mutual understanding. Western scholars have been influenced by long-established stereotypes about eastern europe, which have been compounded by linguistic boundaries. in the sociology and anthropology of religion, for example, those stereotypes were given intellectual force by the great german pioneer, max Weber. His understanding of secular modernity and capitalism was firmly linked to the Protestant reformation and assumptions about the essential mysticism characterizing Orthodox Christianity (Hann 2011: 14). More recent interpretations reproduce the sharp separation in different guises. charles taylor, for example, in his influential A Secular Age (2007) brings Protestantism and Catholicism together into ‘a unitary “north atlantic world”’ and ignores eastern traditions. as hann notes, the ‘reader is left with the impression that eastern christendom is a radically different world’ (ibid.: 12).

Western ignorance has been compounded by a lack of knowledge about research undertaken across eastern and south-eastern europe on local religious traditions, which has a long history; see, for example, the work of those operating within the ethnology and folklore tradition, such as Lavtižar 1933, Czarnowski 1938, Stabej 1965, Ramovš 1977, Čapo 1991, Belaj 1991, Ramšak 1996 and Psihogiou 1996. Although German universities, in particular, have acted as an important conduit for the dissemination of East European research, their global influence has been restricted by the post-war dominance of english as the global lingua franca, as well as by the power of anglophone universities and the academic publishing industry in an increasingly globalized market. east european conferences on the sociology and anthropology of religion, ethnology and folklore have been forced to adapt to this shift in academic and linguistic power. many of their meetings now use english as the main means of communication and we followed suit at the Zadar conference.

even so, the adoption of english has enabled research on east european pilgrimage to cross territorial and intellectual borders. From the early 1990s, scholars from the East European region have made a significant contribution to this flow through their study of particular religious sites (for example, Vukonić 1992, Jurkovich and Gesler 1997, Buzalka 2007, Sekerdej, Pasieka and Warat 2007, Karamihova and Valtchinova 2009, Niedźwiedź 2010), religious pilgrimage routes and journeys (Jackowski and Smith 1992, Kozlowski 2008), or secular pilgrimages (Belaj 2008; Povedak 2008). They have also contributed to recent

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Introduction: Crossing the Borders 3

edited volumes led by western scholars (Margry 2008, Albera and Couroucli 2012, Hermkens et al. 2009). Awareness among western scholars of pilgrimage in east europe has increased since 1989, partly through studies by western scholars of religion or some other segment of the culture (Duijzings 2000), or particular religious shrines (Bax 1995, 2000, Claverie 2003, Bowman 2010). Chris Hann and hermann goltzin in their edited volume, Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective (2010), have also helped to bring pilgrimage research within more general discussions of religious processes across eastern europe, while studies by Kormina (2004, 2010) and Rock (2007) on pilgrimage and popular religion in russia have shown us the danger of simply shifting stereotypes and boundaries further east.

interestingly, there still appears to be a certain reluctance to examine the contemporary relationship between pilgrimage, politics and place-making in western europe. admittedly, attention has been paid to the contested nature of pilgrimage, especially by anthropologists, but even here the emphasis has often been on the play of power and resistance at the shrines themselves rather than in relation to secular political institutions. the more open route of the camino to santiago de compostela has encouraged researchers to look beyond particular sacred sites and to the interplay of religious and secular processes. Frey (1998), for example, has explored the multifarious religious and non-religious motivations among those using the various routes while attention has also been paid to the involvement of political institutions in spain and Brussels and the economic forces at play (Plasquy 2010). Until the recent publications by Jansen and Notermans (2012) and Fedele (2013), the most effective analyses of the imbrication of religious, political and economic processes had been produced by those discussing the relationship between pilgrimage and tourism (Badone and Roseman 2004, Timothy and Olsen 2006), or the emergence of a particular shrine such as Lourdes (Harris 1999, Kaufman 2005, Claverie 2008). The relationship between contemporary European pilgrimage and politics has been largely studied outside western europe in eastern and south-eastern Europe (Dubisch 1995, Bax 1995, 2000, Duijzings 2000, Belaj 2008), or far beyond the region (see Sax 1991, Bianchi 2004, Reader 2006).

This Volume

the substantive chapters in this volume are grouped into three parts. in Part i, Chapters 2 and 3 consider the role played by pilgrimage in creating new homes or reclaiming old ones. Hence, in Chapter 2, Mario Katić examines the development, and re-creation of a Bosnian pilgrimage shrine. he explores the catholic church’s relationship towards the people, in particular, and its influence on the creation and preservation of Bosnian croat identity through the building of a new national shrine – Kondžilo. This process of place-making involves the materialization of symbols in the landscape in order to project an image and communicate a story about the Bosnian croat struggle and the need for national unity. drawing on his





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own research and experience as a participant in the pilgrimage, he shows how building a shrine and creating new places in the sacred landscape of Kondžilo affects pilgrims, not only in terms of their religious practices and pilgrimage experiences, but also through their sense of belonging to a particular ethnic community. He shows how the Church seeks to materialize its role and influence in that community by leaving a permanent stamp on physical space. through the building and rebuilding of the Kondžilo shrine, the Church asserts the permanent presence of croats in Bosnia, despite their declining population and deteriorating economic and political situation.

The religious celebrations at Kondžilo enable Croats from both inside and outside Bosnia to unite in celebration of their religious and ethnic identity. this theme of return and diaspora is continued in chapter 3 through giorgos tsimouris’s study of the annual summer visit by greeks to their original homeland – the island of imvros/gökceada – which is now part of turkey. he outlines the historical background to their forced departure, the interpretation of the island’s recent history by Turkish officials and tourist office, and how the Greek returnees contest these interpretations of ‘what really happened’ in ways that can be tolerated by turkish officials. Their return involves pilgrimage as well as a holiday, since it coincides with the Feast of the assumption and is their way of reclaiming their homeland – however briefly. The Turkish authorities, on the other hand, see the Greeks as tourists, who are contributing financially to the island’s impoverished economy, rather than as pilgrims or exiles. they emphasize the democratic face of the turkish republic, especially in an island that is a living testimony to intolerance and the negation of religious, cultural and national otherness. tsimouris concludes that the greek returnees through religious and daily rituals during their summer visits conflate past and present, mundane and sacred experience, and ethnic and national identity, and challenge fixed territorial imaginaries and national boundaries.

in Part ii, we see that the interweaving of religious and ethnic identities does not necessarily lead to the contestation of space between rival religio-ethnic groups. at the local level, there are opportunities for inter-religious dialogue and the sharing of sacred space. Furthermore, competition may be just as rife within a religious boundary as across that boundary. Zvonko Martić and Marijana Belaj in Chapter 4 show, therefore, how a pilgrimage site in olovo, Bosnia, operates as a place where different ethnic and religious groups can collaborate and coexist – in this case, muslims and catholics. they challenge popular and political discourses about Bosnia (and its pilgrimage sites) that emphasize inter-ethnic and inter-religious separation and conflict, and they join other anthropologists in demonstrating how pilgrimage sites can – in practice – be shared by members from different religious affiliations. They show that the reality of Bosnia is much more complex when religion and identity are not perceived as exclusionary phenomena. inter-religious dialogue in olovo occurs occasionally, mostly during catholic holidays. the balance of the involvement of muslims and catholics in the dialogue varies, while the dialogue itself extends beyond religious belief and practice. they analyse past and present inter-religious dialogue between catholic and muslim believers in





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olovo on three levels: as a dialogue of religious experience, a dialogue of life and a dialogue of deeds. they conclude that the inter-religious dialogue does not mean that religious boundaries are totally porous; the believers remain firmly linked to their own religion and do not avoid their differences. Religion provides rules and guidelines for action, but the space of inter-religious exchange enables opportunities to emerge for solving problems imposed by the reality of everyday life.

competition between shrines within the same ethnic-religious community is the theme of Chapter 5. Here, Anna Niedźwiedź examines the concept of a ‘national shrine’ through an analysis of how the Polish national story (and history) is encrypted into the lived spaces and narratives of two marian sanctuaries: Jasna Góra, seen as a traditional and historic ‘national shrine’, and Licheń, perceived as an aspiring new ‘national shrine’. The national dimension of Jasna Góra seems to be broadly accepted and recognized by Polish Catholics, at least since the 1990s – while the national dimension of Licheń is also gaining significant and competing attention. Responding to Licheń’s rapid spatial development and popularity, Jasna Góra has eagerly engaged visually and symbolically with the most pressing national issues and constructed further layers of national historiosophy encrypted into it. during the post-communist period, the dominant national dimension of Polish popular catholicism has been mirrored in the development of many shrines across the country but despite Jasna Góra’s continued national significance, the most radical and influential expression of that dimension has developed at Licheń.

Part iii contains three chapters where the secular dimensions of pilgrimage and place-making come to the fore. In Chapter 6, Konstantinos Giakoumis focuses on albania where after the second World War the communist regime declared the country to be the world’s first atheist nation. He outlines the history of religious place-making before the communist regime, the development of secular pilgrimage during Communism and the subsequent revival of Christian shrines since the 1990s. He shows how various combinations of person, place, text and movement have shaped both religious and secular pilgrimages. Person-centred pilgrimages were established around the remains of secular national heroes or where the blood of Communist fighters or ‘neo-martyrs’ of the secular regime was spilt. After the fall of communism in 1991, some communist pilgrimages were erased, while others underwent a process of reinterpretation, thanks to their polysemy which helped to disassociate them from state-imposed communist ideology.

chapter 7 also investigates the contested process of place-making in the context of secular pilgrimage. Polina Tšerkassova focuses on post-Communist Estonia and its capital, tallinn. she links the process of contested place-making to state politics in order to gain a more profound understanding of the interconnectedness between pilgrimage and politics as well as the processes of sacralization, sterilization and re-sacralization of certain public places of commemoration. her case study concerns struggles surrounding the monument of the unknown soldier in tallinn. her main argument is that secular pilgrimage to the monument can be interpreted as a redemption of proximity not just with the victims of war but also with physically





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remote family members and dead relatives, whose graves are scattered around the vast territory of russia. hence, the nation’s sacred borders are continually contested and renegotiated through the attempts to redeem the connection with the deceased relatives, which is undertaken through movement, commemoration and other practices of pilgrims.

In Chapter 8, Nataša Gregorič Bon addresses the discursive differentiation between religions, on the one hand, and tolerance and sharing at the level of practice on the other. she focuses on the relationship between two different religio-ethnic traditions (christian orthodox and muslim), as well as local groups (emigrants and locals) in the Himarë (the official, Albanian name) or Himara (the local, greek name) area in southern albania. she examines the orthodox pilgrimage to stavridi, which is undertaken on the day before the Feast of the assumption. this particular pilgrimage brings together the local population with emigrants, who are originally from the area but mainly live in athens in greece. she interprets the emigrants’ homecomings as a secular pilgrimage and vice versa. she concludes that the emigrants reconstruct their sense of rootedness, constitute their identity and reinforce their attachment to the place, and that the religious and secular pilgrimage they are involved in can be interpreted as the trope of a route, with its temporal and spatial dimensions related to the process of place-making.

The Central Themes in this Volume

The Relationship Between Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making

The influence of Communism as a political and ideological regime, not surprisingly, acts as a key theme in the chapters set in albania, Bosnia, estonia and Poland. Yet, the regime’s relationship with religion and religious institutions depended on how communism developed both nationally and locally. We see in this volume how communism’s collapse opened the door for religious communities to express their identity in countries where religion could be a vehicle for ethnic identity. We also see how their revitalized strength and presence in albania, Bosnia and Poland has been most visually expressed through architecture with the construction of new shrines or the rebuilding of older ones. all kinds of state and church institutions try to influence, in a top-down process, the creation, re-creation and destruction of pilgrimage places, as well as the meanings and messages they send. Yet, pilgrims have their own politics and they are the ones that make a particular project successful or not. through pilgrimage (migrations), permanent presence close to a site, or the financing of buildings, pilgrims create the changes from the bottom up, whether this involves supporting their local church leaders or confronting them.

Albania provides perhaps the most vivid illustration of state politics’ influence on religion and religious institutions. as konstantinos giakoumis shows, the communist regime introduced secular ‘sacred’ places and pilgrimages in an attempt to break the power of religious shrines and institutions. Yet, although religious





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sites in albania and other post-communist countries have been revived together with pilgrimages to them, Polina Tšerkassova’s Estonia case-study reminds us that secular pilgrimage places can retain their political, social and cultural attraction for some ethnic groups and have become symbols of a different time and events – times which may be seen by some as the ‘good old days’ (see Belaj 2008).

in the albanian, Bosnian and turkish case studies, we also see how the growth of modern travel and virtual communications has enabled even pilgrimage places, located in regions almost abandoned by a particular community, have acquired significant political influence. They are sometimes the only reason why thousands of people come back to their native countries and at least for a brief period of time make an important political statement and presence.

Movement, Contestation and Dialogue

all the chapters consider the process of movement in different forms. For some, movement involves physical journeys to a country of origin. These are typically undertaken by those from the diaspora during the summer and centre around the Feast of the Assumption on 15 August, as well as Marian shrines which attract both roman catholics and orthodox christians. the position of these visitors is sometimes highly ambiguous and their feelings are very ambivalent. those participating in the Bosnian pilgrimage described by Katić and the Greeks visiting imvros discussed by tsimouris had been displaced by war or forced migration and are – formally at least – no longer members of the territories or nations, which emerged from subsequent treaty agreements. Their return raises the painful issue of belonging, seen in countless examples of loss and dislocation around the world. they are returning to a ‘homeland’, where they are seen as outsiders by those now occupying the locality.

In the Bosnia example, Katić describes them as Bosnian Croats while those returning to imvros call themselves imvrii or imviotes, that is, as those who belong to the island despite being displaced. the contested character of both places is evident in the mixture of religious and secular activities and the part played by religious leaders. At Kondžilo, Bosnian Croats from the diaspora mingle with members of the local Croat minority who returned after the early 1990s war. The ongoing political tensions and ethnic division within the new republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina are reflected in the Roman Catholic leaders’ comments about local politics and election contests. Katić does not tell us much about what the local Serbs think about the pilgrims, but in the Imvros case the Turkish officials see the greek visitors as ‘tourists’ and they seek to unite them with other tourists through secular entertainments, which rival the religious festivities where the imvrii seek to express their attachment to the sacred homeland.

While these two chapters explore the tensions and conflicts around pilgrimages, coexistence and dialogue across religious and ethnic boundaries is clearly possible. Hence, Belaj and Martić seek to counter the influence of studies by Bax and Hayden which emphasize the role played by pilgrimage sites in former Yugoslavia – and





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Medjugorje in particular – as ‘spaces of religious, ethnic and political conflict’. At the Bosnian shrine of olovo, catholics and muslims make ritual use of the same sacred space, even if boundaries are drawn in both physical and ideological terms. during the catholic ceremonies, muslims stay outside the church fence and do not confuse their devotion to ‘holy mary’ with maryam, the mother of the prophet isa. at other times, however, muslims enter the church to seek mary’s help. at the local level, therefore, multi-level dialogue challenges assumptions that sacred places will simply reflect or resist wider political conflicts – an example, in other words, of what others have discussed in terms of shared shrines and sacra (see Albera and Coroucli 2012, Bowman 2012).

Religious and Secular Pilgrimage – Identity and Memory

all the shrines discussed here are being used as markers of identity. since identities are shifting conditions, so are the pilgrimage places as symbols of those identities. they can serve as a symbol of our pilgrimage place in the same religious community (Poland), symbol of our national identity in situation when we are nothing but a minority in some troubled region (Bosnia, turkey, albania), symbol of our community even if the pilgrimage place is not from our religious denomination (again Bosnia), or even be a symbol of some lost time, people and events (estonia and albania).

Although most of the chapters consider pilgrimage as a journey to and from a religious shrine and the rituals taking place at a sacred place, the studies by Gregorič Bon, Tsimouris, Giakoumis and Tšerkassova show how pilgrimage can involve both religious and secular processes. For the albanian migrant workers, who spend most of the year in greece, the august holidays provide an opportunity not only for religious pilgrimage but also for a more general communion with their origins, like the ‘roots’ tourists visiting ghana or scotland described by schramm (2004) and Basu (2004), for example.

the interweaving of religious and secular processes can be accompanied by other conflations. At Imvros, the Greek returnees through religious and daily rituals during their summer visits also conflate the past and the present, mundane and sacred experience, and ethnic and national identity, and challenge fixed territorial imaginaries and national boundaries. in the albanian and estonian case studies by Giakoumis and Tšerkassova, we see how personal calendars can be affected by changes in public calendars with the collapse of communism. Yet the transformations in time and space effected in albania were less dramatic in estonia, where the soviet monument and associated may day pilgrimage survived until recently, before being moved to the edge of tallinn. despite the monument’s forced mobility, russian-speaking devotees still come to the empty space in the city centre to fill it with red flowers. They insist on commemorating a past conflict and a continuing struggle to maintain both their status as an ethnic minority in independent estonia and their ties with another homeland – russia. different histories and calendars are again at work here with the new, highly demonstrative





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estonian national monument appearing nearby acting as a rival place of secular, nationalist pilgrimage in the country’s ritual calendar.

through movement, people can switch their identities and become somebody else, or return to the people they used to be. this is where memory comes into play. movement of people with distinctive identities, ideas and feelings needs a material and tangible place that will channel all these emotions and statements. Places are being created from the top down, others are being de-constructed in order to arrest these movements, expressions of identity and memorialization, while others are being preserved working from the bottom up.

Person, Place, Text and Movement

the relationship between person, place, text and movement explored in coleman and Eade (2004) and subsequent volumes on pilgrimage is explicitly addressed by Katić and Giakoumis. Yet, other chapters reveal this relationship, especially Niedźwiedź’s Polish case study. Here, the national competition between the two shrines involves a very personal, highly charged relationship between devotees and Our Lady through journeys to and from a sacred place where there is space to develop a range of attractions. through what might be described as a religious ‘Disneyfication’, the main attraction – the icon of Mary and child at Częstochowa and Licheń’s icon of Mary – are surrounded by statues, buildings and landscaping which are designed to stimulate the visitors’ imagination, emotions and religious understanding. this process of creating ‘thick places’ is assisted by textual representations – guidebooks, texts on monuments, references to the Bible, website pages – which are linked to other texts, such as theological commentaries and school history textbooks and communicated through the media industry and the Internet. This reflects the crucial advance of literacy across Europe and its impact on local devotions imbued with oral traditions and ‘folk’ memories.

While other chapters demonstrate the importance of transnational ties linking diasporic communities to their ‘homelands’, the Polish case study explores not just the ties between religious and political elites and ‘ordinary’ people through networks, which bring the local and national together – it also reveals the growing influence of supranational, European identity. Hence, the Częstochowa shrine is represented as both a national and european sacred centre through a process of memory-making, where Poland is located at the centre of europe rather than on its eastern border. the past informs the present where Poland is playing a prominent role in an expanding european union.

Monumentality and Changing Landscapes – the Intertwining of Religious and Secular Processes

a striking feature of the case studies is the development of new and ever more imposing monuments. Both urban and rural landscapes are affected by the appearance of these monuments. some shrines generate the growth of urban





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centres around them – Częstochowa is the obvious example here, while Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje provide more recent illustrations. Other shrines remain secluded rural venues – for example, Kondžilo – which only come alive on certain occasions. The changes in architectural design raise questions about aesthetic appearance. are the new structures sympathetic to their surroundings? What values are being employed when we describe them as ‘kitsch’ or ‘overbearing’?

these developments and the issues they raise are not peculiar to europe or christian pilgrimage – they appear around the globe and involve all the ‘world religions’ through hybrid forms of ‘spiritual’ religion and secular political institutions. in Japan, for example, shinto shrines complicate western attempts to sharply separate religion and secular worlds, so that the Yasakuni shrine in tokyo, which commemorates those who died in service of the emperor since 1868, is a complex of buildings where rituals of ancestor worship can be combined with a visit to a museum containing weapons employed during the second World War. statues and other features have been donated to the complex which covers a wide area of 6.25 hectares. The building of churches, temples, gurdwaras and mosques around the world are another expression of interweaving religious and secular impulses since they not only provide – sometimes on an impressive scale – space for worship but also affirm the presence of a particular ethnic or national group. in cities expanding through global migration, these buildings have sometimes emerged through a highly contested political process involving local, national, transnational and global identities (see Eade 1997, Garbin 2012).

Economic Processes

the rapid development of some of the shrines discussed in this volume points to the economic dimensions of contemporary pilgrimage which have attracted scant attention in pilgrimage studies. Where economic considerations have been addressed, this has usually been through discussions of the complex relationship between pilgrimage and tourism. Yet, the operation and expansion of major shrines involves massive accumulation and investment of resources generated by local communities, transnational networks, regional and national governments and, in some cases, supra-national institutions such as the european union.

attention is turning belatedly to the ways in which pilgrimage and religion, more generally, contributes to and is shaped by neo-liberal market forces (see Gauthier, Martikainen and Woodhead 2011, Reader 2013). As Kaufman’s study of the development of lourdes during the second half of the nineteenth century reminds us (Kaufman 2005), shrines have long been deeply implicated in the growth of modern modes of consumption. this point is clearly appreciated by those studying pilgrimage in Japan, for example, who have demonstrated that the interweaving of the religious and economic has a long history (see reader 2006, 2013). Jesus Christ’s expulsion of the moneylenders from the Temple has encouraged a christian ambivalence towards the presence of economic activities within sacred space which finds little resonance in Japanese traditions.





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Insiders and Outsiders

the complex interweaving of meanings and material culture explored in this volume demonstrates the importance of avoiding simple distinctions between pilgrim, tourist, exile, visitor, insider and outsider, sacred and secular. it also raises important questions about territorial, ethnic, bodily and conceptual boundaries, the degrees of thickness and thinness in boundaries, their porosity and changing shape, as well as the overlap between and the collapse of boundaries. these interweavings and questions appear in various guises during this volume, but one classic ethnographic question returns consistently throughout – the extent to which the researchers themselves are insiders.

This question is more closely explored by Mario Katić, who describes his role as pilgrim, organizer, researcher and Bosnian croat. here is someone whose family was displaced by the war in former Yugoslavia, who suffered the loss of family members and was brought up in Zagreb as a member of the Bosnian Croat diaspora. Polina Tšerkassova also reveals her personal engagement with the Russian-speaking minority in Estonia, while Zvonko Martić’s role as a Catholic priest clearly informs his research interest in inter-religious dialogue. konstantinos Giakoumis clearly identifies with the Imvrii visitors as a Greek. Nataša Gregorič Bon is the most obvious outsider in terms of her ethnicity, but her research over a period of time enabled her to build relationships where she could, to some extent, become an insider.

Crossing Boundaries

this volume brings together, therefore, scholars from eastern and south-eastern europe to explore the crossing of borders through the study of the relationship between pilgrimage and politics and the role which this plays in the process of both sacred and secular place-making. Because it is almost impossible in many countries across this region to separate religion from nations and nationalism, place-making is intimately associated with (changing) constructions of the nation. Religious institutions have frequently acted as guardians of the nation and national unity, and during inter-ethnic conflicts, religious leaders have been among the first to raise the flags of war and lead their religious-ethnic community in the fight against the other. the disintegration of Yugoslavia provides a sobering illustration of how religious affiliation can mark a nationality and became involved in the denunciation of the other. such a pattern can be found across almost all of south-eastern europe.

We have sought here to avoid yet another overview of papers, book, ideas and definitions. Our main intention in this introductory chapter has been to provide an outline of the chapters and discuss the main themes emerging from them in order to show how, in practice, politics and pilgrimage connect and how this connection influences place-making. The case studies from different areas of eastern and





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south-eastern europe demonstrate the complexity characterizing the relationship between pilgrimage, politics and place-making and how careful attention must be paid to the micro historical context. the meaning and functions of a particular pilgrimage site and journey can go in various directions – they can be symbols of national identity or a sharing between different national and religious communities; they can be ways to keep one imaginary community together or serve as reasons for conflict and division; they can act as political statements or commemorate past periods and events. Through this publication, we seek to be the first to bring a comparative perspective to the complex and under-researched phenomenon of both religious and secular pilgrimage in central, eastern and south-eastern europe. We hope that this volume will make a significant contribution to the development of studies of religion, pilgrimage, nationalism and politics in this highly dynamic area of europe.



Pilgrimage, Politics and Place-Making in Eastern Europe

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