Dina Boero

Institute for Advanced Study

Celebrating a Saint: Between Architectural Program and Lived Religion at Qal‘at Sim‘ān

In the past several decades, anthropologists have highlighted that pilgrimage sites generate constant negotiation between official power and resistance to it, continual enforcement and subversion of social boundaries, and ongoing arbitration of sacred and secular spaces and performances. This presentation examines the competing discourses that produced the shrine at Qal‘at Sim‘ān and its saint Symeon. In the first part, I introduce the spatial organization of Symeon’s monumental pilgrimage complex to show how the site’s central architectural elements formed a hierarchically organized and prescribed route with increasingly controlled access to the column. In the second part, I highlight ways in which visitors undermined the shrine’s hierarchical organization and prescribed path of movement and, in doing so, put into action their own conceptions of the saint and the site.