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Over the past decade a series of workshops, conferences and publications have examined, from various perspectives, the practices of inter-communal interactions around what are generally termed ›shared‹ holy places. Many of these have focussed on regions which had previously been under imperial rule, and one active field of study has investigated shrine sharing in the Mediterranean Basin, particularly in its southern and eastern parts. The present contribution takes a recent exhibition as a starting point to discuss, from an anthropological perspective, how intercommunal interaction could unfold in the Ottoman Empire, and how the decline of imperial rule and post-imperial developments led to its eventual erosion.

Recent discussions of shared holy places naturalize situations of either antagonistic dispute or syncretistic mixing. Although each respectively recognizes more or less extended periods of sharing or of conflict, there seems in each formulation to be an underlying logic—either temporal or spatial—of “antagonistic tolerance” or of “syncretistic sharing.” This essay, partially ethnographic and partially historical, focuses on the Holy Sepulchre or Church of the Anastasis (resurrection, in Greek), the “mother church” of Christianity, in an attempt to shift the analytic logic away from the identities of communities that cohabit sites toward institutions that attempt to own, or at least control, those sites. A multitude of Christian sects claim the Anastasis as their own, but such claims are always mediated through structures of state power, and these shape choreographies of conflict or of sharing.

This paper aims to contribute some contemporary fieldwork insights\ud from Macedonia to discussions on the coexistence of Muslims (both\ud Sunni and Sufi) and Orthodox Christians around sacred sites. While\ud recent developments have led to the dominance of ‘clash of civilisations’\ud discourse in such situations, I here use detailed studies of the three\ud sites where intercommunal mixing occurs to evidence a range of\ud different modalities of interaction, spanning a spectrum from overt\ud antagonistic intolerance through non-conflictual cohabitation to\ud forms of sharing close to syncretistic practice. The paper investigates\ud the elements of the social fields engaged by these communities that\ud prompt hostility, permit coexistence, and promote identification, and\ud inquires whether the more benign forms of interaction currentlymanifest in Macedonia are atavistic in settings increasingly marked\ud by ethno-nationalism and fundamentalism.