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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.

This paper examines the case of Rachel’s Tomb, a shrine revered at various times by various combinations\ud of Muslims, Christians and Jews, looking at how the increasingly incommensurate ideas of local\ud inhabitants and immigrant Jews about how the holy place should be approached led initially to a spatial\ud separation within the shrine and then to violent, and exclusive, battles over sectarian (and increasingly\ud ‘national’) properties.

The great majority of the world's holy cities and sacred shrines attract pilgrims from\ud culturally circumscribed catchment areas, and thus host pilgrims united by strong degrees of\ud cultural homogeneity. Jerusalem, on the other hand, draws pilgrims from a vast multitude of\ud nations and cultural traditions. During religious festivals - which tend to be imbricated\ud because of the antagonistic engagement of Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Jerusalem's\ud streets swarm with men and women displaying a rainbow of secular and religious costumes,\ud speaking a cacophony of languages, and pursuing a plethora of divine figures. Other sacred\ud centres which attract pilgrims from areas as heterogeneous as those which provide\ud Jerusalem's pilgrims - eminent among these Mecca (which nonetheless services only the sects\ud of a single religion) - funnel their devotees through ritual routines which mask differences\ud beneath identical repertoires of movement and utterance2. Jerusalem's pilgrims, on the other\ud hand, go to different places at different times where they engage in very different forms of\ud worship. The result is a continuous crossing and diverging - often marked by clashes - of\ud bodies, voices and religious artifacts. Jerusalem does not, in fact, appear so much as a holy\ud city as as a multitude of holy cities - as many as are the religious communities which\ud worship at the site - built over the same spot, operating at the same moment, and contending\ud for hegemony.

A long history of intercommunal relations around local holy places in historic Palestine\ud (a history which sadly seems to be coming to a close in the current day) draws attention to what\ud precisely is the character of the attachment felt by local residents to sacred sites. Muslim-\ud Christian ‘sharing’ of holy places (maqam, plural maqamat) can be seen to express a dependency\ud on powers perceived of as resident in a site, and the nominal affiliation of these powers to one\ud religion or another is o?en not a matter of great concern to those ?equenting the shrines. It is,\ud however, a focal concern of the officiants of the respective religions who lay claim to the sites\ud and who seek to expunge heterodox practices and traces of ambiguous affiliation (cf. Hayden\ud 2002 and 2011). I here investigate records of local usages of religious sites, largely rural, in\ud Palestine up through the Mandate Period in order to argue that shared shrines, as opposed to\ud those which appear to be communally homogeneous, foreground issues of agency obscured in\ud those sites under the control of religious authorities.

In his profoundly influential 'The Clash of Civilizations?' Samuel Huntington asserts that 'Islam has bloody borders' (Huntington 1993: 35). Throughout all but the first three centuries of its existence, Orthodox Christianity has shared borders with Islam across immense stretches of territory extending at times from North Africa to the steppes of Asia. In this paper I look at Muslim Christian interaction in one small portion of that shared borderland, examining inter-communal interaction in the context of religious shrines used by both communities in Macedonia (a.k.a. FYROM). In so doing I demonstrate the potential range of interaction between Islam and Christianity -- from amicability to antagonism -- and analyse the grounds of both neighbourliness and inter-communal antagonism. I also, in investigating Orthodox communities in their encounters with 'their other', draw out elements of Orthodox belief and practice which prove less notable in more homogeneous settings.