REL/GralINt-Common saints, common shrines/Metaphysically divided, tangibly linked

The following information is used for educational purposes only.





























(Photo credit: Giannis Fafoutis)













Common saints, common shrines


Metaphysically divided, tangibly linked

May 27th 2013, 16:47 by BC




AS I write this posting, huge crowds of people are converging on a remote Greek village whose main feature is a large, modern church. What attracts the pilgrims, many of whom trudge over dusty, undulating roads for an entire day, is not the church itself but the small, robed body of a saint known as John the Russian, visible behind a glass case strewn with flowers. Hundreds of miles to the east, in a slightly larger town in central Turkey, which is now all Muslim, people also revere this man. Not just on one day but all year round, they remember him as somebody whose devotion and piety still casts an enduring glow of holiness over the places and objects that marked his life.

For a holy man who continues to influence so many humble Christians and Muslims, he is quite a shadowy figure. It seems that in the early 18th century, while fighting for the Tsar against the Ottomans, a young soldier was captured and taken into the service of a Turkish officer, a local bigwig in a town called Urgup in Turkish and Prokopi or Prokopion in Greek. Somehow a relationship which began as servitude turned into one of loyalty and mutual esteem. One of the few detailed stories told about the saint is a unusual case of religious crossover. John's overlord was on pilgrimage in Mecca, but feeling nostalgic for Urgup. Telepathically sensing this, John prayed for his master and a dish of steaming pilaf, exactly the sort he loved to eat back home, appeared before the homesick pilgrim, in a familiar-looking dish.


In 1924, as part of a swap of religious minorities, the Christian population of Urgup/Prokopi had to migrate to Greece, and they brought Saint John's body with them. They settled in a village on the island of Evia and called the place Prokopi after their Anatolian homeland. The saint became the centre of a huge local cult in Greece, but he is not forgotten in the Turkish place where he spent most of his life.

Dotted across the former Ottoman empire, and in many other parts of the world, there are hundreds of other shrines, objects and relics which have played a part in the rites of more than one religion. Even where Christians, Muslims and others have been separated by the advent of nationalism and modernity, the memory of shrine-sharing often persists.

Another example: the monastery of Mar Elias (the prophet Elijah) outside Bethlehem is a place where Christians and Muslims continued until very recent times to congregate for a summer festival. As Glenn Bowman, a social scientist, has written, the two communities had different beliefs about the history of the place and its holy objects, such as an icon and a chain, but the location itself brought them together. This sort of thing has been going on for a long time. Sozomen, an ancient historian, described how Mamre near Hebron (traditionally the site of an angelic visitation to Abraham) attracted Christian, Jewish and pagan pilgrims, all of whom gave different reasons for making the journey.

Site-sharing or relic-sharing is not always amicable, and a place or object that draws people together in one generation can send them into a frenzy of violent competition in the next. Religious authorities tend to be suspicious of common shrines. But it's a curious fact of religious history that people with utterly different metaphysical beliefs can sense holiness or transcendence in the same place or the same person. Depending on how the situation is managed, that can be a bond, or an occasion for bitter competition and strife. Nothing is predetermined. But in any part of the world with a history of religious strife, the authorities surely have a duty to encourage amicable sharing rather than the other sort, wherever it is possible.






Source: www.economist.com