A Shrine in a Private Site: St. George`s Spring in Veliko Tarnovo (Bulgaria)

Abstract

The article presents a case study, which has been conducted in a new pilgrimage center, “invented” in post-socialist Bulgaria. The key questions are: how a place is legitimated as holy in the 21 ^st century and what are the reasons for this? What are the possible main actors inventing the sacred space in search of the manifestation of God’s blessing? What is the framework that allows the orthopraxis and orthodoxy at such places to exist, while at the same time allows our contemporaries to accept as holy a new spring that gushed in a private property and is denied by the Orthodox Church as a legitimate pilgrimage center?