Lieux saints et politiques de l’identité : construire la « Mecque » et la « Jérusalem » bulgares

Abstract

The paper studies the interrelationship between identity policies and the constructing of the two most significant cult complexes in the Rhodope Mountains – Enihan Baba’s tyurbe and Krustova Gora. The two holy places are located in a contact area of different ethno-confessional groups – Christian Bulgarians, Muslim Bulgarians, who are the major population in the researched area, and Turks. This borderline state favours the symbolic expression of different religious identities, and that is precisely what the two places under study are, being meaningfully called respectively “the Rhodopean Mecca” and “the Bulgarian Jerusalem”. Enihan Baba is the most revered saint of the Muslim Bulgarians. His tyurbe is situated on the 2,000-metre high Svoboda Peak. The visits to Enihan’s tyurbe and the organized kurbans are turning into a major form of religious expression of both the local Muslim Bulgarians and the ones who have migrated from the region. The second holy place (Krustova Gora) is a Christian pilgrim centre in a region inhabited by a Muslim population. In the 30s of the 20th c. the clairvoyant Yordan Stoychev identified Krustova Gora as the place where a fragment of the Holy Cross had been buried and initiated the “renewal” of the holy place with the placing of an iron cross at the peak. In the communist period, Krustova Gora functioned as a regional pilgrimage centre, and it was only after the political change in Bulgaria in 1989 that it became a national pilgrimage centre. The new architectural design of the two holy places at the beginning of the 21st c., which has consumed a lot of capital, demonstrates their being thought of as symbolic representations of religious belonging, on a national level as well. Their transformations in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st c. are closely connected with the ruling policies of the Bulgarian state to integrate the Muslim Bulgarians into the Bulgarian nation. The different strategies of the Muslim Bulgarians to adapt to the changing social environment leads to various tendencies in their identity (one part of the Bulgarian Muslims claim a Turkish identity, many choose the self-denomination “Pomaks”, still others consider themselves “Bulgarians”, giving a preference to their Bulgarian ethnic and language identity over the religious one).