Κοινοί Ιεροί Τόποι
Shared Sacred Sites in the Balkans and the Mediterranean
Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art
Thessaloniki Museum of Photography
Yeni Camii (old Archeological Museum)
Thessaloniki, Greece
(September 23, 2017- January 31, 2018)
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Dionigi Albera (IDEMEC-CNRS)
Karen Barkey (University of California, Berkeley)
Stergios Karavatos (ThMP) with the help of Danae Tezapsidou
Thouli Misirloglou (MMCA)
Dimitris Papadopoulos (Western Michigan University)
Manoël Pénicaud (IDEMEC-CNRS)
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Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art
Thessaloniki Museum of Photography
Municipality of Thessaloniki
Stavros Niarchos Foundation
Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation
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Alexis Akrithakis, Alexandros Avramidis, Manolis Baboussis, Gianni Berengo-Gardin, Félix Bonfils, Benji Boyadgian, Faraj Chammas, Marios Chatziprocopiou, Elli Chryssidou, Manuel Çitak, Dimitris Condos, Magali Corouge, Lydia Dambassina, Eva Darara, Yiannos Economou, Thierry Fournier, Harris Georgoussis, Filippos Gkoutzos, Christophe Goussard, Nele Guelck & Nikolai Antiniadis, Noha Ibrahim Jabbour (reproduction), Robert Jankuloski, Izzet Keribar, Maria Kompatsiari, Elizabeta Koneska, Sara Kuehn, Cynthia Madansky, Ludovic Maisant, Marco Maïone, Natassa Markidou, Jean-Luc Manaud, Lino Mannocci, Diàna Markosian, Cécile Massie, Virginia Mastrogiannaki, Giorgos Mavrommatis, Andrea Merli, Ilias Michalakis, Ayse Özalp, Paris Petridis, Leda Papaconstantinou, Theodoros Papagiannis, Avraam Pavlidis, Manoël Pénicaud, James Porter, Franck Pourcel, Antonio Pusceddu, Siyah Qalam (reproduction), Guy Raivitz, Nana Sachini, Ivo Saglietti, Malek Sahraoui, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Fanny Sarri, David Sauveur, Gildas Sergé, Ahikam Seri, Laramie Shubber, Ragna St Ingadottir, Marios Teriade Eleftheriadis, Yorgos Tsakiris, Franco Tuccio, Nikoletta Tzianoudaki, Jeff Vanderpool, Marios Ververis, Tassos Vrettos
photos
about the exHibit
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On September 23, 2017, we opened Shared Sacred Sites exhibition in Thessaloniki, Greece. Part of the international multi-year Shared Sacred Sites project, the exhibit engages the public in conversations about tolerance and coexistence among religious groups. This exhibition is hosted by three local institutions of art and culture: Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, and Yeni Cami, and funded by generous grants from Stavros Niarchos Foundation and Nicholas J. and Anna K. Bouras Foundation. On the first day in Thessaloniki, the exhibition attracted hundreds of visitors.
“As they have done for centuries, Christians, Jews and Muslims pray today in sanctuaries belonging to another religion. Shared sacred sites are a well–established phenomenon in the Mediterranean, revealing the permeability of the frontiers between religious communities. Despite theological differences, the three religions share a number of elements in terms of beliefs, rites, holy figures and sites. These crossovers, however, are not devoid of ambiguity and can sometimes also lead to conflict. The Mediterranean world thus offers many examples of sharing, but also of partition and division.
The three–part exhibition “Shared Sacred Sites” explores this phenomenon by locating it through various examples in different contexts and by bringing forward the entangled places and practices, symbols and figures that define it.
Thessaloniki, is ideally positioned to tell the story of ‘Shared Sacred Sites’, not only because the three monotheistic religions have historically flourished here, but also because today the city finds itself at the Mediterranean crossroads of migration. The three–part exhibition, designed as a sort of ‘pilgrimage’ to the city, reveals both historical and contemporary aspects of ‘sharing the sacred.’
The first part, at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, provides the visitor with an experience that blends anthropological research and contemporary art. The second part, at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, presents a visual journey through the diverse geographies of sacred sites in the Mediterranean. In the third part, at Yeni Camii, the exhibition offers a historical narrative of Thessaloniki, privileging a religious osmosis that occurred between the three religions as they accommodated to living together.”
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Thessaloniki, A City of Sharing
Thessaloniki is a significant city in its rich history of diversity—religious and secular. Throughout the history of the Ottoman Empire, Thessaloniki was one of the most vibrant multi-ethnic and multi-religious trading cities of the empire. Its conviviality attracted all different religious communities and became known throughout the Empire. To this day, the city neighborhoods preserve vestiges of this interfaith cohabitation and collaboration.
Retracing the city’s multicultural past recently became even more vital amidst the rise of intolerant and exclusionary politics in different regions of the world. Once in the past, the city’s diverse character was violently dismantled by the annihilation of its Jewish population during the Nazi occupation. Today, the narratives of tolerance become particularly critical as Greece finds itself in the middle of a double financial and a humanitarian refugee crisis at the margins of Europe and at the crossroads of human flows and mobility across the Balkans and the Mediterranean.
Through this exhibition, we aim to revisit the city’s legacy of sharing, tolerance and diversity. Considering current debates of inclusion and exclusion, borders, encounters and interactions in Europe, the “Shared Sacred Sites” exhibition offers an alternative view of the Mediterranean as an open, shared and networked space and sheds light to both historical legacies of coexistence and contemporary cases of faith communities living and praying together.
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The Opening occurred on September 23, 2017, in the presence of Thessaloniki Mayor Iannis Boutaris.
On the opening date, Yeni Cami hosted a concert by Savina Yannatou, a talented singer, songwriter, and composer who captivated the crowd with her magical voice and exuberant charisma. Although her main repertoire consists of Greek traditional music, she also experiments with free jazz and avant-garde styles.
Then an International Workshop was organized on September 24, 2017 at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography. Download the program.
Participants: Karen Barkey (University of California, Berkeley), Aron Rodrigue (Stanford University), Maria Kavala (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Panagiotis Poulos (University of Athens / Sonorcities), Dimitris Stamatopoulos (University of Macedonia), Dionigi Albera (CNRS-IDEMEC), Maria Couroucli (CNRS), Sara Kuehn (University of Vienna), Nurit Stadler (Hebrew University), Nimrod Luz (Western Galilee College), Mustafa Diktas (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Giorgos Mavrommatis (Democritus University of Thrace), Fotini Tsibiridou (University of Macedonia), Dimitris Papadopoulos (Western Michigan University), Margarita Markoviti (Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, ELIAMEP), Despina Syrri (Symbiosis), Thierry Fabre (Aix-Marseille University), Nikolai Antoniadis & Nele Gülck
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