Summary
Every 1st of May, in the region of Farsala (Thessaly), pilgrims meet at the shrine of Turbalı Sultan Baba, a Muslim Bektashi saint. Albanian Muslims who immigrated in Greece in the 1990’s or 2000’s come to pray to him and other Bektashi Dervishes buried in the sanctuary. According to tradition, before to become a Bektashi tekke (“convent”), the building would have been a former Greek Orthodox monastery dedicated to St. George. 

Already mentioned in the works by Frederick Hasluck, it seems to be a case study of an “ambiguous space” with contemporary continuities in the Greek context. What is significant nowadays is that Greek Orthodox pilgrims simultaneously join the Bektashis to visit the holy place. Taking place in May, this feast day is also linked to the celebration of the springtime and to “Hederlezı”, a popular holiday for Muslims in the Balkans related to Elijah and Hıdr (al-Khidr).

This paper is the result of a fieldwork carried out in 2016. I will present observations, reflexions, photographs and a short movie (7 min and subtitled in English) I made.

Manoël Pénicaud is a French Anthropologist and a Research Fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is based in Aix-en-Provence at the IDEMEC (Institute of European Mediterranean and Comparative Ethnology, Aix-Marseille University). He is a specialist in pilgrimages, cult of saints, shared holy places, interreligious dialogue and figures, Abrahamic hospitality, visual anthropology and museology. Among recent publications: Louis Massignon. Le “catholique musulman” (Bayard, 2020); “Votive Exopraxis. Muslim Pilgrims at a Christian Orthodox Monastery (Büyükada, Istanbul)” (with B. Fliche, Common Knowledge, 2020); and Shared Sacred Sites (coedited with K. Barkey et D. Albera, NYPL, 2018). He is also one of the curators of the touring exhibition Shared Sacred Sites held at the Museum of Mediterranean and European Civilizations in Marseille (Mucem, 2015), Tunis (2016), Thessaloniki (2017), Paris (2017), Marrakesh (2018), New York (2018) and Istanbul (2019).