Sacrum and Space. Hierotopy of Cephalonia Island (Preliminary Results of the Pilot Study)

Abstract

The Byzantine and post-Byzantine cultural heritage of Greek islands and peninsulas is still a blank slate for most Europeans. Only a few scholars from outside Greece focus their scientific studies on artefacts and anything which could be considered as so-called intangible cultural heritage of the humanity. The objective of the study was to investigate the hierotopy of the religious heritage of Cephalonia. I was interested in whether the island has hierotopic spaces, saturated with special power and the resulting special creation in the islanders’ minds. I searched for the beliefs about the origins of these places, extraordinary events, or the related sacred figures and organizations of spaces in the places used by Cephalonians for religious worship.

The article uses qualitative methods of scientific research applied from the emic perspectives (free interviews, explicit and implicit participatory observation, photographic documentation and analysis of visual material). The research also focused on the secondary (historic and ethnographic) sources as well as on resources available on the Internet.

The study has shown that an important role in Cephalonians’ religious imagination is played by the insular nature of the region and the elements: the sea surrounding the land and the earthquakes which cyclically strike the island. These specific natural conditions have given birth to local legends and hierotopic creations of places of religious worship. They have formed the pantheon of the holy figures, whose presence is emphasized by the specific hierotopy of the places of religious worship built on the island.