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PILGRIMS, TOURISTS, and LANDSCAPE in MOUNT ATHOS and METEORA Veronica Della Dora University of Bristol, UK

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PILGRIMS, TOURISTS, and LANDSCAPE in MOUNT ATHOS and METEORA Veronica Della Dora University of Bristol, UK Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 951–974, 2012 0160-7383/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures doi:10.1016/j.annals.2011.11.013 SETTING AND BLURRING BOUNDARIES: PILGRIMS, TOURISTS, AND LANDSCAPE IN MOUNT ATHOS AND METEORA Veronica della Dora University of Bristol, UK Abstract: The peninsula of Mount Athos and the rocky complex of Meteora are the two largest monastic communities in Greece and among the main holy landmarks in the Ortho- dox Christian world. Both are UNESCO sites and, besides their unique cultural and spiritual heritage, they also host the most stunning world’s sceneries. As such, Mount Athos and Mete- ora constitute powerful magnets for vast numbers of pilgrims and tourists. Yet, differences in their history and in the management of tourist flows make them different too. This article approaches the two sites through the lens of landscape, destabilizing boundaries between the sacred and the secular, the sublime and the prosaic, tourism and pilgrimage. Keywords: Mount Athos, Meteora, landscape, pilgrimage, heritage, wilderness. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Great and wonderful are Thy deeds, O God the Almighty! Who shall not fear and glorify Thy name, O God? (Rev. 15: 3–4) In paradise for the first time. (Italian visitor to Mount Athos) INTRODUCTION Wilderness and the holy share two main similarities. Firstly, they both evoke separation from the ordinary against which they are defined. Secondly, taken literally, they both cause ‘bewilderment’, wonder, displacement. Wilderness is psychological as much as it is geographical: it can be a state of mind and a state of the land (Lane, 1998). Yet, for Veronica della Dora is Senior Lecturer in Geographies of Knowledge at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol (School of Geographical Sciences, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK. Email <[email protected]>). She is the author of Imagining Mount Athos: Visions of a Holy Place from Homer to World War II (University of Virginia Press, 2011) and co-editor with Denis Cosgrove of High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice, and Science (IB Tauris, 2008). Her research interests and publications span cultural and historical geography, history of cartography, Byzantine and post-Byzantine studies, and science studies. 951 952 V. della Dora / Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 951–974 many today the term ‘wilderness’ evokes nostalgia, compassion, per- haps even a sense of moral guilt, rather than threat or mystery. In the western geographical imagination wilderness is no longer an un- bound terra incognita, but, rather, a precarious archipelago to be safe- guarded from the evils of modernity. And so are holy sites. As with wilderness, these are often envisaged as ‘islands’, which is, as spiritual refuges ‘we can turn for escape from our too-muchness’ (Cronon, 1995, p. 69), or simply as fragile ecosystems surrounded by the encroaching desert of secularism and banalization. The word ‘holy’ derives from the Germanic halig, which means some- thing that must be preserved ‘whole’ or intact; something that, like wil- derness, cannot be transgressed or violated. In Greek, however, ‘holy’ is less about conscious preservation and more about unmediated re- sponse: aci o1 comes from the verb af olai, which means simply ‘to stand in awe, or in fear’ (Mpalatsoukas, 2009). In the Judeo-Christian tradition God usually chose to speak through charismatic prophets and holy men and through equally ‘charismatic places’ set apart from the inhabited world: mountains, caves, deserts—in other words, through wilderness (Williams, 1958). Today many of these places have become important shrines and pilgrimage destinations; often they have also become popular tourist attractions. More often, however, they have become points in which these two categories blur. After all, both pilgrims and tourists are after an ‘extra-ordinary’ experience (Cohen, 1979; Dicks, 2003; Turner & Turner, 1978). Over the past two decades a number of scholars across the social sci- ences and the humanities have increasingly problematized rigid dichotomies such as human/nature, urban/wilderness, sacred/pro- fane (see, for example, Cronon, 1995; Eade & Sallnow, 1991; Latour, 1993). In the light (or as part) of these debates, pilgrimage and tour- ism have also been object of much critical rethinking (Badone & Rose- man, 2004; Rinschede, 1992). Cultural anthropologists and tourism scholars have suggested a continuum, rather than a binary opposition between these two categories, sometimes destabilizing the semantic meaning of pilgrimage itself (see, for example, Cohen, 1979; Cohen, 1992; Collins-Kreiner, 2009; Collins-Kreiner, 2010; Reader, 1993; Smith, 1992; Timothy & Olsen, 2006). Depending on the author’s degree of emphasis on ‘social construc- tion’, these studies have been usually caught between two standard spa- tial categories: place and space, which is, the shrine and pilgrims’ (or tourists’) ritualized performances (Coleman & Crang, 2002; Coleman & Eade, 2004) and mobilities (Bajc, Coleman, & Eade, 2007; Morinis, 1992). While social scientists have been particularly interested in the articulation of space through movement and social practices, theolo- gians and historians have usually continued to focus on shrines as places (at once material and symbolic) and on their ontological power, or what Preston (1992) calls ‘spiritual magnetism’, which is, their ability to facilitate the contact with the transcendent and the creation of com- munitas (Inge, 2003). Yet, what surrounds the shrines and how it affects both the shrine’s status and visitors’ experience has usually gone lar- gely understudied, if not ignored. V. della Dora / Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 951–974 953 This article seeks to further these debates through the lens of land- scape. The term landscape refers both to a framed view of specific sites and the scenic character of whole regions (Cosgrove, 2006). It is both a socio-economic product, and a ‘way of seeing’ shaped by culturally spe- cific pictorial conventions (Cosgrove, 1985; Gold & Revill, 2004).While some recent studies do refer to pilgrims’ appreciation of the natural environment at pilgrimage sites (including Orthodox shrines), land- scape usually remains a contour, or rather, a backdrop to pilgrims’ experience (see Andriotis, 2009; Coleman & Elsner, 2003; Gothoni, 1998). At the same time, extant studies discussing the role of nature (and landscape) in shaping spiritual experiences focus on tourists mov- ing outside of the frame of institutionalized religion (Digance, 2003; Sharpley & Jepson, 2011). Here I would like to move landscape to the fore and focus explicitly on its agency in the context of religious pilgrimage sites. In other words, I would like to ‘put landscape to task’ (Rose, 2002). Not only does landscape contribute to the shaping of the pilgrim’s experience, I argue, but it can also be a primary attractant for other categories of visitors (I use the generic term ‘visitor’ to encompass the wide range of motivations behind a journey to a sacred site). As such, it may often dramatically increase the pressure on the shrine by non-pilgrims and in turn impact pilgrims’ experience and their own experience too, be- sides the lives of permanent residents (Digance, 2003). The article contributes to recent studies on Orthodox pilgrimage shrines (Andriotis, 2009; Gothoni, 1998; Shackley, 2001; Rahkala, 2010; Dubisch, 1995; Kotsi, 1999) from a cultural geography perspec- tive. In particular, it focuses on the peninsula of Mount Athos and the rocky complex of Meteora, the two largest and most iconic monas- tic communities and major pilgrimage centres in Greece, also renown for their natural beauty and breathtaking sceneries. As the article will show, the two sites share many similarities and are bound together by the same spiritual tradition. Yet, historical circumstances and the different strategies their permanent residents have adopted to regulate visitors’ flows—self-containment through spatial boundaries and access restricted by visitors’ numbers (and gender) in the case of Athos versus mass access restricted by temporal boundaries in the case of Meteora— make these sites very different case studies. As Myra Shackley notes, when sacred sites (and in this case the land- scape in which they are embedded) become visitor attractions, opera- tion management becomes essential, and ultimately ‘it is the task of sacred sites to manage the mysterious and reach for the sublime, while coping with the prosaic’ (2001, p. xviii). Yet, studies on holy sites man- agement usually focus on localized congested sites, such as individual shrines and monasteries (Carlisle, 1998; Shackley, 1998). How are these policies implemented over extended areas such as Athos and Meteora? How do they impact the experience of pilgrims and tourists? Can we trace stark boundaries between these two categories of visitors? And ultimately, can we separate the ‘monastery experience’ from the ‘landscape experience’? 954 V. della Dora / Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012) 951–974 The article is structured into five substantive sections. Having briefly outlined the historical and ‘insular’ similarities between the two sites and the methodological approaches adopted in this study, the third part of the article addresses ‘boundary-making strategies’ on Athos and Meteora from both the perspective of visitors and stakeholders. Yet, I argue, physical
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