pilgrimage

Bishop Methodian Campanian and the Practice of Pilgrimage to the Holy Land of the Russian Emigration: (Re)Invented Tradition

The paper deals with the Russian émigrés’ pilgrimage to the Holy Land after the Second World War. The author analyzes the phenomenon of the restoration of group pilgrimages as a process of reinventing the pilgrimage tradition first developed mainly in the peasant milieu at the turn of the twentieth century. The annual trips from France organized by Bishop Methodian Kulman served as the basis for the new pilgrimage movement and the formation of a new community of “co-pilgrims”, uniting Russian Orthodox emigrants from all over the world.

Russian Diplomat in the Vilayet of Islamic Holy Sites in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

This article endeavors to detect the goals, main tracks and priorities of the Russian diplomacy in a vilayet of the Ottoman Empire — Hejaz, which hosted major Islamic sanctuaries. Religion and politics were tightly interwoven in Russia’s diplomatic activities there. Our analysis is made at the micro level, through the official correspondence of a Russian diplomat, Michail Nikolsky, who in the early 20th century served as a secretary of the Russian Imperial Consulate in Jeddah, Hejaz.

Pilgrimage as a Path to Faith: An Essay on a Social Construction of Religiosity

The article is devoted to pilgrimage and represents an anthropological interview with the researcher’s comments. The interview was recorded on April 2019, in Elista, at the religious community of the Temple “Golden Abode of Shakyamuni Buddha”. The narrative shows how a pilgrimage to India is perceived by Kalmykia’s believers as a means of coping with life’s hurdles and of searching for its new meaning.

Body and Sociality in New Age Pilgrimage

The paper explores the interaction with sacred places in New Age pilgrimage. There is a tendency in social theory of religion to define New Age spirituality as individualized form of religiosity in accordance with the notion of “private religion”. Such an interpretation is based on the priority of personal beliefs and narratives upon bodily aspect of religious experience and the ways of reflecting about it.

Managing Sensational Forms: Optimization, Maximization and Efficacy. The Great Fair in Kalwaria Pacławska

The “Boneless” Saint from Baku: Muslim Pilgrimage in a Secular City

Constructing Holy Spaces in Multicultural Milieu: the Case of “Zajde Bašće” Shrine in Nish (Serbia)

A Shrine in a Private Site: St. George`s Spring in Veliko Tarnovo (Bulgaria)

«A Place Where God Has Touched the Land in a Special Way»: Medjugorje as an International and Intercultural Space

With Icons and Psalms, or a Bishop in Flight from his Flock. Mass Pilgrimages in Russia in the Times of Stalin and Khrushchev

Pilgrimages to monasteries or other holy places were a traditional religious practice among Orthodox believers up to 1917. Despite the Soviet government’s proclamation of state atheism, it was only with the mass terror in the 1930s that these practices disappeared. Yet in the context of World War II and Stalin’s following policy change towards religions, believers felt encouraged to practice the pilgrimage again. This article examines a pilgrimage to the famous monastery called “Rooted solitude” (Korennaia pustyn’) by the city of Kursk (Central Russia).