Introduction: Material Religion in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue “Material Religion in Central and Eastern Europe” provides an overview of various aspects of material religion in Central and Eastern Europe. It focuses on three major issues and their interconnectivity, which have played an important role in the social, political, and religious history of this macro-region: the much-debated notion of Central and Eastern Europe as a cultural and political region of the continent, the “glocal” aspects of material religion, and the role of material religion in the field of religious studies in this region. The article discusses the major topics and methodological approaches of the contributors of this special issue, highlighting the variety of research perspectives in religious studies in the post-communist regions.

Keywords: :

• material religion
• Central and Eastern Europe
• wounded identities
• space sacralization
• minorities

Introduction

This special issue of Material Religion is dedicated to the study of Central and Eastern Europe, an area which has had numerous cultural, political, and religious definitions—and borders—in the last century (Szűcs 1983, Borodziej, Holubec, and von Puttkamer 2020). Based on a recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center (Evans and Baronawski 2018), religion still plays a significant role in most parts of Central and Eastern Europe (with the striking exception of the Czech Republic and Estonia, where less than 10% of the population considers religion as an important factor in their daily life). This contrasts sharply with Western Europe, and the religious diversification (pluralism) of society is one of the major research topics of contemporary studies of religion in Central and Eastern Europe. The concept of pluralism has inspired much debate among scholars of this region, who have explored the local and glocal forms of de-­secularization and the unique post-soviet forms of religious pluralism that exist here (Berger 2005; Müller 2009; Tomka 2011; Pickel and Sammet 2012).

Over the last three decades, much research has focused on the social and political aspects of religion in this region, giving less importance to other dimensions of religion, such as the cognitive, the sensorial, and the material. In one of the most prestigious journals focusing on religion in Central and Eastern Europe (RASCEE: Religion and Society in Central and Eastern Europe, journal of the International Study of Religion in Eastern and Central Europe Association) the notion of “material religion” or the “materiality of religion” is completely missing. There have been a few major studies published in recent decades that focus on the material dimensions of religion in this region of Europe (Jonuks 2005; Nešporová and Stahl 2014; Kapaló and Vagramenko 2021). Most of these were produced by archaeologists, classicists, and anthropologists, who focused on religions of prehistory, antiquity, and vernacular religion (Meier and Tillessen 2014). Most of this research focused on individual case studies, not broader regional trends. To date, there has been little theoretical debate among scholars about the specificities of material religion (with local and glocal focus) that characterize this region. This special issue aims to fill this void by bringing together a broad range of articles that explore the distinct characteristics of material religion in Central and Eastern Europe.

As both Central and Eastern Europe and material religion are complex and much-debated notions in contemporary religious studies, this article and the following contributions can focus only on some of the local and glocal particularities and some relevant case studies from the region. A terminological clarification of key terms is important, not only for a contextualization and methodological coherence of the contributions of this volume, but also from a historiographic point of view.

Central and Eastern Europe: Religion and Glocalization

Europe, as a political and cultural macro-region, has long been characterized as a pluralist and fragmented region with several political units and cultural areas (Harvie 2005). This was true especially in prehistory and antiquity until the formation of the Roman Empire, which created the first administrative, political, and cultural cohesion in most parts of Southern and Central Europe (Woolf 2012). Not only did the Roman Empire unite the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern European regions into an economic, political, and cultural macro-region, but its imperialism allowed local and glocal forms of people, objects, and religious identities and communication strategies to emerge over the centuries. The region known as the Danubian provinces (the Danube floodplain from the territory of present-day Bavaria to the mouth of the Black Sea) was an economic macro-region within the Roman Empire known as the Publicum Portorium Illyirici, but such artificially created administrative units (customs offices, provinces) rarely created a collective religious identity (Szabó 2022). The unity of the Danubian provinces cannot therefore be seen as a precursor of modern history in ­Central-Eastern Europe, although there was undoubtedly much greater mobility and religious networks among the region’s population than elsewhere in the Empire.

Central and Eastern Europe became a distinct religious and cultural macro-region in the European Middle Ages, when, after 1054, Christianity split into two major spheres of influence: the Catholicism of the Roman Papacy and the Orthodoxy of the Patriarch of Constantinople (Whalen 2007). Although the region remained broadly under the influence of the papacy, it developed an identity to Western Europe as the unruly, unstable border zone where Catholicism confronted Orthodoxy. This continental dichotomy, caused by a sharp religious (theological) rupture, was further exacerbated by the Ottoman Empire’s conquest of much of Central and Eastern Europe, which further separated Western Europe from Central and Eastern Europe from the 14th to 17th centuries. In this period, however, the region known as Mitteleuropa can still be sharply distinguished, in which the corpus politicum (the concept of the state in the nobility and the crown) had already developed by the end of the Middle Ages and the socially formative phenomena of humanism and reformation had appeared, while in the predominantly Orthodox states of Eastern Europe these political, social and cultural phenomena rarely found followers (Szőcs 1983, 160). The cultural, religious and political differences between Central and Eastern Europe remained in the 18th and 19th centuries. While Central Europe was dominated by the Habsburg Empire (and later the Austro-Hungarian Empire) (Rady 2017), the Eastern region of Europe was dominated by the emerging Russian Empire. The interaction between these two empires created a number of borderlands, where the fundamental features of the two regions merged and created the specificities of inter-imperialism, glocalization, or creolization (Boatcă and Parvulescu 2022). Johann August Zeune’s (Zeune 1820) and his successor Jenő Szűcs’ much debated and repeatedly re-analyzed continental model (Trencsényi 2017), placing little emphasis on these glocal regionalisms, although he himself points out in several places that the tripartite division of the continent into “West,” “Central,” and “East” cannot be clearly drawn on modern political maps (Szűcs 1983, 133).

The political, cultural, and historical diversity of Central and Eastern Europe, which goes back centuries, becomes blurred and starts to uniformize mainly after 1945, when the political rise of the Soviet Union brought a large part of the Central European region (except Austria), and the whole of the Eastern European region, under Soviet (communist) influence. This new kind of macro-regional identity (Central-Eastern Europe, Soviet bloc, socialist states) existed for nearly five decades, but this was not enough to transform the social and religious realities of the Middle Ages and early modernity, except for a few common features (Tomka 2011, Máté-Tóth and Rosta 2016). The majority of research continues to analyze the region in a local or micro-­regional (country-by-country) fashion, less frequently in a global context, and there are heated debates about what the notion of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern (Balkan) Europe means in the contemporary post-1990 world order (Trencsényi 2017, Schenk 2017, Mishkova 2017). These meso-regions are framed by the theory of collective, wounded identity developed by András Máté-Tóth (Máté-Tóth 2019, Máté-Tóth 2022). In his conception, the absolutist and later totalitarian regimes of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian-Soviet empires created social tensions, a permanent lack of security, ethnic and nationalist conflicts. Inter-imperiality provoked also religious and political tensions in the region. Taken together, these constitute the collective “woundedness” of the region, where the new wave of religion and pluralism after 1990 is joined by a specific experience of securitization and woundedness (Máté-Tóth and Szilárdi 2023). The academic literature on the geopolitical and economic strategies of the European Union also increasingly emphasizes the unification of Central and Eastern Europe, as their economic and cultural specificities appear to be unified from a Western political perspective (Grgić 2023).

Despite the unifying specificities and collective woundedness identity that emerged in the post-1945 period, I argue that the religious phenomena in the region, especially the creation of material religion and its role in religious communication, needs to be researched glocally or locally (Dessì 2022). This is what the concept of Central and Eastern Europe expresses. Take the material religious sources of contemporary Romania as an example. Due to its historical characteristics, the country does not show a uniform picture, and its religious history also shows a radically different picture in Transylvania, Dobruja, or Oltenia. In addition to the meso-regional and historical characteristics, when analyzing the sources of material religion, it is necessary to take into account not only the makers of the objects, but also their human (users) and divine (addressed god, spirit or saint) agency. Object biographies meaningfully go well beyond locality due to intensive human and cultural mobility: each Roman relief or modern Orthodox icon not only reflects the local artistic form of the needs of a local community, but also glocal networks and influences through the historical embeddedness of the meso-region. As part of the Kingdom of Hungary for a long time, then as an independent principality and a province of the Habsburg Empire, Transylvania was closely linked to the German, Italian, and Polish regions. The area of Dobrudja maintained close relations with the Black Sea region, the Turkish Empire, and Byzantium, while the area of Moldova was rich in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian and Byzantine influences, but Catholicism also left its mark. In addition to local characteristics, glocality and inter-imperiality are one of the main characteristics of the region, which provides exciting case studies for researchers of religious pluralism as well as glocalism.

Following the same principle, the studies in this special issue focus primarily on local and global research, neglecting the macro-regional features of the region, although there are several mentions of phenomena that affected Central and Eastern Europe as a whole, such as the Ottoman Empire, Central and Eastern European Jewry, or the common, macro-regional legacy of the post-Soviet religious renaissance.

Material Religion and Religious Studies in Central and Eastern Europe

The study of material religion has now produced a library of literature, the historiographical and methodological analysis of which is not the purpose of this introduction. David Morgan’s definition is an excellent example of the complex and sometimes confused nature of the concept: “Studying the materiality of religion means examining the production of beliefs, practices, ideas, institutions, persons, groups, states, artifacts, and bodies as the ongoing work of social organization and cultural rites and imaginaries. The materiality of religion consists of how feeling, gathering, teaching, learning, punishing, celebrating, hating, adoring, speaking, dressing, eating, breathing, seeing, hearing, touching, and tasting make religion happen” (Morgan 2016, 272). Similar ideas are collected in the volume edited by S. Brent Plate, where material religion is constituted by thirty-seven key terms focusing on body, objects, senses, spaces, time, communities, strictures, and structures of traditions (Plate 2015, 4–6).

Thanks to the “material turn” in the study of religion (Hicks 2010), objects used in religious communication are no longer viewed as merely decorative, descriptive entities detached from living religion, but specific elements of lived religion, which have cognitive, sensory, and habitual dimensions (Rüpke 2018). Material religion is not only concerned with the mediating role of objects and their living and cognitive impact in religious practice, but goes well beyond this to speak of the agency of objects that have a direct impact on human agents and play a decisive role in the experience of religion as well as in other dimensions of religious communication (Smart 1996). As Birgit Meyer and others argued, “a materialized study of religion begins with the assumption that things, their use, their valuation, and their appeal are not something added to a religion, but rather inextricable from it” (Meyer et al. 2010, 209).

While material religion has been an established methodology and research topic in international research for decades, it remains a neglected approach in Central and Eastern European religious studies. Following the Müllerian and Weberian traditions of sociology of religion and philology, the region has ignored the material dimension of religion as a focus of research. Archaeology is primarily trying to fill this gap, although in this field, too, the descriptive, cataloguing description of objects is typical even in the post-processualist and New Archaeology era (Meier and Tillessen 2014). The agency of objects, their role in religious communication, and the analysis of the material dimensions of religiosity have so far been applied in only a few cases in the region (Szabó 2018; Szabó 2022).

The absence of material religion from religious studies research is only one of the many research dimensions that should be filled by the religious studies tradition in Central and Eastern Europe. During the Soviet period, religious studies in this region was a repressed and rarely applied discipline, gaining space and professional shelter mainly in archaeology, ethnography, and theology journals (Ciurtin 2008; Máté-Tóth and Rosta 2016; Máté-Tóth, Szilárdi, and Szugyiczki 2023). In the post-1990 period, the region quickly tried to catch up with the international scientific mainstream, dominated mainly by the West, but new methodological trends (material turn, spatial turn, cognitive sciences, network research) were slow to take root.

Let us take Hungarian religious studies as an example, while taking into account the fact that every country had its own unique historiography of religious studies. Hungarian religious studies grew out of the philological research of Müller in the nineteenth century (Sarnyai and Máté-Tóth 2009), therefore in its first period (1860–1920) it focused primarily on the textual sources of religious communication. The second period (1920–1948) is marked by the name of Károly Kerényi, who used Jungian psychology of religion, philology, and, as an auxiliary approach, archaeology in his works on religion. His school, the intellectual circle known as the Stemma Circle, and several generations of its members still define Hungarian antiquity and, to some extent, religious studies (Ritoók 1998; Török 2008). In the Soviet and post-1956 Kádár era, Hungarian religious studies produced few relevant works and authors, and philological research returned as the primary method of study (Severino 2021). In the post-1990 period, religious studies managed to grow into an academic discipline and sociology of religion and anthropology of religion became the main, but not the only, focus of Hungarian religious studies (Máté-Tóth, Szilárdi, and Szugyiczki 2023). Many relevant studies deal with the contemporary religiosity of the macro-region, contemporary trends in the philosophy of religion and its local manifestations, and the philological analysis of textual sources (Hoppál and Kovács 2010). The traditional focal points of the main periods of Hungarian religious studies show that many new research trends and methods are almost completely absent in the research of local case studies. One of these is the topic of material religion, which has been published by few authors in Hungarian so far, and their studies focus on the archaeology of religion (Gazdapusztai 1965; Hegedüs 2017; Szabó 2021). Romanian religious studies has followed a very similar path to the situation in Hungarian religious studies, where the topic of material religion is only present in archaeology (Ciurtin 2016).

The aim of the international workshop entitled “Materiality of Religion in Central and Eastern Europe” organized by the Department of Religious Studies, University of Szeged (September 2021) was to fill a gap in the regional research history and create a network of scholars focusing on the materiality of religion in this region of the world. We aimed also to go beyond the descriptive method and object-biographies, emphasizing the role of spatiality in religion and the possible agentive roles of materiality in religious communication. The articles of this special issue are the results of our international workshop, which was the first one of this kind in Central and Eastern Europe. Addressing the rich variety of dimensions of material religion is hardly possible anymore in a special issue, or even in a handbook (Plate 2015), therefore the foci of these articles are the material aspects of space and religion, based on the four chronotopes or space-times suggested by Thomas Tweed (Tweed 2015, 227–228): the body, the home, the homeland, and the cosmos. Spaces of religious communication are interpreted by the authors as spaces with agency: they make and are made, focusing on the creative act and historical dimensions of creating, maintaining, and evoking the memory of religious spaces (imagined or material as well). Historical dimensions of material religion (and especially, spaces of religion) are essential elements in Central and Eastern Europe too, although this is not an exclusive feature of the region. They represent a constitutive element of collective identities, new nationalisms, cultural interconnectivities, political memory, and the traditions of woundedness as well. There is no academic study of religions without history in Central and Eastern Europe: understanding religion in this region of Europe is deeply contaminated with the flux of religious “genomenon,” a historicity of religion (Casadio 2016, 34).

The articles in this issue are arranged in roughly chronological order, although the principal focus was to cover a large variety of materiality of religion. Sara Kuehn’s article examines embodied material traces of Islamic mysticism in Ottoman Hungary. Kuehn’s work focuses on three of the most iconic surviving sites associated with Islamic mysticism in Ottoman Hungary: the mausoleums of two mystics known as Gül Baba in Buda and Idris Baba in Pécs and Sultan Süleyman’s türbe next to a Sufi dervish lodge. The author argues that, despite their public prominence, little is known about the associated early modern socio-religious materialities of these three sites. This study sheds light on Sufi corporeal performances and (embodied) material practices, sensory engagement, and synesthetic experiences. Kuehn’s study is particularly important in historiographic context because the religious materiality of Islam is one of the less researched fields in Hungary.

The second article by Martin Klapetek examines the Central Cemetery in Vienna, Austria. Klapetek argues that the sections for Muslims in the Central Cemetery in Vienna have gradually expanded spatially from its edge to the central parts. Monuments, which have been installed on terraced graves mainly since the mid-1970s, can be understood as a partial source of information about followers of Islam living in one of the metropolises of Central Europe. Klapetek’s paper combines the traditional methods of quantitative statistics with the study of objectscapes (inscribed epitaphs) and funeral landscapes in an urban context.

Ágnes Ivett Oszkó and Dóra Pataricza’s study entitled “Judaism as Flowers: The Materialized Ideology of the New Synagogue of Szeged” examines one of the most important synagogues of Hungary built in the first years of the twentieth century. Built by Lipót Baumhorn, a prolific architect who revolutionized Hungarian synagogue architecture, the monumental building from Szeged and its garden represents a unique religious landscape, where materiality has a direct, agentive role in religious communication.

In their study, Natalia Zawiejska and Anna M. Maćkowiak focus on the link between religion and activism. Their article argues that religious materialities (i.e. placards, banners, stickers, performances) play a formative role in contemporary protests concerning the rights of women, LGBTQ + people, and refugees. The protest movements deliver new types of religious icons that are managed by affective, creative, and semantic modalities of aesthetics. Their article uses the concept of “aesthetics” as a crucial analytical tool for the study of the materiality of religion.

The last article is written by Tõnno Jonuks and explores the materiality of modern paganism in Estonia. The author presents the case study of the maausulised (Earth-believers), a reinvented religious tradition which has taken a caretaker position and gives guidelines on behavior at sacred sites.

The studies share not only a common macro-regionality (Central and Eastern Europe) and historical background often contrasted with Western European history but show a particular focus on the various strategies of religious communication and space sacralization in micro- and meso-spaces (nature, houses, cemeteries, the urban environment). The contributors and I hope this issue will serve as an invitation to future research on material religion in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as a helpful corrective to some of the western biases that have influenced the study of material religion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Csaba Szabó

Csaba Szabó is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Szeged. Previously, he was assistant lecturer at the Lucian Blaga University Sibiu (2018–2021) and doctoral research fellow in the Sanctuary Project at the Max Weber Kolleg, University of Erfurt (2014–2017). A historian of religion with expertise in Roman religion in the Danubian provinces and reception of antiquity, his research concerns space sacralization in Dacia and the Danubian region and history of archaeology in Transylvania. His latest book, Roman Religion in the Danubian Provinces, was published by Oxbow Books in 2022. [email protected]