Abstract

 
 
 This article examines how pilgrimages are constructed as a shared ritual of seeking sacred traces, thus creating and reproducing the sacred landscape. It studies an annual event with three connected Finnish Karelian Orthodox processions as a pilgrimage from an anthropological perspective. The event combines various motives, goals, and participants through a similar construction of the sacred landscape, with rituals of nding and creating the sacred in and for the landscape with personal experiences and stories of the imagined past. These processions, one of which crosses the border with modern Russia, attract participants motivated by both religious and heritage tourism. The article draws inspiration from Laura Stark’s notion of a ‘cult of traces’ and engages with pilgrimage studies and theories to offer an analysis of how various acts such as religious rituals, storytelling, and taking pictures are combined in the reproduction and reinvention of the imagined past and the creation of a marked meaningful present to construct and sustain a sacred landscape, thus forming a pilgrimage.
 
 
Highlights
This article examines how pilgrimages are constructed as a shared ritual of seeking sacred traces, creating and reproducing the sacred landscape
Pilgrimage is often seen as a journey to a sacred centre, focusing on location, community, and rituals (Turner and Turner 1978; Coleman 2015; Della Dora, Walton, and Scafi 2015)
In my research I followed an annual event with three processions in Eastern Finland, a location shaped by history with scattered and relocated sites of personal and cultural importance
Summary
The basis of this work draws on original fieldwork. In August 2016 I travelled to Eastern Finland to study and document Orthodox Christian rituals over a weekend that included three cross processions and their associated rites. Following Laitila, Stark (2002, 175) identifies these as attributed to sacred boundaries of local communities, wilderness, and monastic sacred centres These categories can be identified in the pilgrimage in question here, I suggest both should be viewed as important, not oppositional, aspects of the issue that are not that different. Such elasticity is visible in how pilgrims create the landscape through their differing interpretations of the same accounts and sites Motives categorized as both religious and secular intertwine in them, mutually contributing to the construction of landscape and its evaluation, marking and setting boundaries and meanings within it. In old Karelia, Stark (1995) notes, objects and centres of pilgrimage (monasteries, chapels, icons) were collectively interpreted and shared in stories, recreating myths and their meanings. In the contemporary scene the interpretation and sharing go beyond apparent religious symbols
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