Religious Heritage Complex and Authenticity: Past and Present Assemblages of One Cypriot Icon

Abstract

Drawing on data from ethnographic fieldwork, this study focuses on an icon known as Panagia Amirou kept at the Amirou Monastery in Cyprus. Instead of analyzing its unusual form, consisting of two icons from different times inserted one into another, this paper uses the concept of “religious heritage complex” to understand the special status of the icon, the complexity of the assemblages it has joined over time, and the relationships between religion and heritage. The Panagia Amirou icon has become the symbol of the monastery and appears to be crucial for the creation of a shared identity by giving the community the feeling of a connection to the past and continuity of monastic tradition, for as they believe, the icon and the monastery are from the same time. Particular attention is paid to the process of authenticating the icon’s special status. The legend recounts not only the icon’s old age but also its miraculous appearance and the healing power inherent in it from the very beginning, so it authenticates, together with processions, not only the alleged connection of the icon with the beginning of the monastery but also the status of the icon as being miracle-working.

1. Introduction

This study focuses on an icon known as Panagia Amirou (Appendix A, Figure A1) kept at the Amirou Monastery near the village of Apsiou in Cyprus. The icon depicts the Virgin Mary and Child, accompanied by the inscription H ΝΕA ΦAΝΕΡΩΜΕΝH (Ē Nea Phanerōmenē), and it has an older icon inserted into it, one that is severely damaged but yet can be easily recognized as again depicting the Virgin Mary holding Christ.1 The monastery used to be a male monastery but was closed at the end of the 18th century.2 Gradually, the buildings fell into ruin, with the only building to survive being the church where the icon was kept and, according to legend, was protected by a snake. The church was intermittently used by the local community, which believed in the icon’s miraculous power as well as that of a nearby spring, said to be especially effective in curing eye diseases. The image was carried in an annual procession on the Friday after Easter. With time, the tradition moved to the Sunday after Easter.3 In 1997, the monastery reopened as a female order, and the nuns kept the traditions and beliefs in the healing power of the icon alive. This paper attempts to present the complex status of this icon for its users and to scrutinize the process of heritagization of this object, understood as “a transformative and historically contingent process, by which historic artefacts and places turn into objects of display and exhibition with an effect in the present” (Thouki 2022, p. 1036).4 The icon has not entered any official list of cultural heritage, but it became the symbol of the monastery outside the realm of religion. It seems that it played a key role in the process of community identity construction for a larger group than the nuns—the monastery had been closed for more than a century, and it was the nearby populace, especially inhabitants of Apsiou and Mathikoloni, that have maintained a legend of the place and the image, stating that the icon and the monastery are from the same time. I am aware of the fact that heritage is very difficult to describe and has been defined variously within the heritage conventions and literature of the subject (Howard 2003, pp. 6–9; Harvey 2008; Samuels 2015, pp. 5–7). I deliberately do not associate it with public and official institutions, and my understanding follows a broad meaning centering on the notion of inheritance, according to which “heritage is something of value that should be preserved and passed on to future generations within a community that claims it” (Di Giovine and Garcia-Fuentes 2016, p. 3), a cultural process that “engages with acts of remembering that work to create ways to understand and engage with the present” (Smith 2006, p. 44). Such understanding allows for noticing the double status of the Panagia Amirou icon—it is considered valuable as old and connected with the beginning of the monastery, but simultaneously miraculous, so the main aim of this paper is analyzing this aspect. Therefore, I engage particularly with the concept of “religious heritage complex,” which underlines the complex and often nebulous connection between religion and heritage and can be seen as a theoretical tool allowing one to capture this coexistence of two distinctive layers of values attributed to religious materiality and practices (Isnart and Cerezales 2020).

I am also interested in the process of authentication of the special status of the icon and how it is explained and performed by its users, so I ask what sustains the icon’s relevance in the present. Heritage is the past received through objects, events, memories, and commemorations, but it is always “a version of the past” that cannot be confused with history. In a way, it is the use of the past to shape the present, but at the same time only a specific part of the past is selected for contemporary purposes, be they cultural, political, social, or economic (Graham et al. 2005, p. 32). As noted by Meyer and de Witte (2013, p. 276), “heritage refers to the past, but is not automatically and directly inherited from the past. It is the outcome of a selection of certain cultural forms which are—more or less persuasively—canonized.” This religious analogy was taken even further by David Lowenthal (1998, p. 7), who claims that “heritage relies on revealed faith rather than rational proof. We elect and exalt our legacy not by weighing its claims to truth, but in feeling that it must be right.” Therefore, within this paper, I am not interested in the actual properties, such as the real dating of the icon, but rather in the beliefs of its users and what they consider to be authentic. In the context of heritagization, the concept of authenticity plays a crucial role, as it carries a significant potential to legitimate or delegitimate (Chhabra 2010; Silverman 2015; Wood 2020). As shown by various authors, although the concept of authenticity has always been an essential qualifying criterion, for example, in the inclusion of sites on the World Heritage List, it has been interpreted and understood in various ways (Labadi 2010, pp. 70–72; Boccardi 2019). The first explanations of authenticity did not take into consideration non-European perspectives that do not see the authenticity of a property as lying essentially in its original material, but the current approach is more people-centered and recognizes that authenticity can be judged only within a specific socio-cultural context since it is a relative criterion changing from one culture to another or even within the same culture (Jokilehto 1995; Lowenthal 1995; Von Droste and Bertilsson 1995). The same objects or places can cause different interpretations and meanings. This reflects a sense of subjective authenticity, for what may be authentic to one visitor or viewer might not be authentic to another (Griffiths and Korstanje 2022, p. 281). David Lowenthal eloquently argues that authenticity, just like heritage itself, is a negotiated concept. According to him, the very concept of authenticity is peculiar to the modern Western world, whereas, for example, in the Middle Ages people recognized things as authentic because a certain authority validated them as such or because the things themselves demonstrated supernatural powers (Lowenthal 1995, pp. 125–27). Following current research, especially studies applying the notion of performative authenticity emphasizing the dynamic process of “becoming” authentic through embodied practice (Knudsen and Waade 2010; Zhu 2012; Karlström 2015), I do not see authenticity as a stable value but instead as dynamic and relative, and the process of authentication of an icon as a dynamic process of becoming authentic to a particular group of users.

The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 2021 and 2022 that involved interviewing not only the nuns living at the Amirou Monastery but also an age-diverse sample of interlocutors consisting of visitors to the monastery and the nearby populace, with varying degrees of attachment to the monastery itself. My research involved extensive participant observations: attending liturgies, processions (21 November 2021; 29 April 2022; 1 May 2022), the everyday life of the monastery, and keeping notes. In times where direct note-taking was not possible, as, for example, during services in the church, there was reliance on memory, and notes were written down as soon as possible. They helped me reflect on the rituals and processions with the icon. I conducted in-depth, semi-structured individual and group ethnographic interviews in the monastery and had numerous informal, open conversations with my interlocutors, equally with those who visited this place for different reasons than the religious. Their beliefs and stories connected with the Panagia Amirou icon helped me understand their personal connection with this object and showed the importance of processions and the legend surrounding it. I enriched my data with information from older interviews conducted between 2007 and 2008 by researchers from the Cyprus Research Centre in Nicosia. Recordings of these interviews are kept in the Oral Tradition Archive (Aρχείο Προφορικής Παράδοσης),5 where I conducted the archival investigation on 30 June 2022. I also visited the nearby village of Apsiou for additional interviews conducted in people’s homes in order to collect legends and understand the role of the Panagia Amirou icon in shaping local religious and social interactions.

I will interpret those interactions as assemblages understood in Assemblage Theory that draws attention to the ceaseless interaction of human and non-human agents (DeLanda 2006, pp. 10–25, 28–46). It has already been noted by various scholars that the materiality of icons must be understood as a performative, lively network of interconnected sensorial elements (Pentcheva 2006, 2009, 2010, pp. 121–49; Gamberi 2017). As I have presented elsewhere, while analyzing the unusual form of this icon (Zaprzalska 2022),6 I propose to see the icon, its viewers, its surroundings, and even elements such as the light reflected from the gilded surfaces, the fragrant incense, and the sounds of prayer as important parts of social assemblages where each of their elements affects or modifies the other elements. Within this paper, I use it rather as a theoretical tool that allows us to interpret the world as an assemblage of various elements in order to see the importance of all of them and pay attention not only to the relations between the icon and people but also to other material objects, for example, the copies of the icon and the publication published by the monastery, or intangible elements such as legends and religious rituals. Applying this approach by presenting how the Panagia Amirou icon became a part of various human and non-human assemblages highlights the complexity of the assemblages that it has joined over time and shifts the emphasis to changes in its use, perception, and presentation. It provides a slightly broader perspective and shows that the present importance of the icon and its complex status are a product of the current assemblage, which is very complex itself. Within this paper, I am interested in how this specific icon is perceived and treated in everyday life by its users—in other words, its role in lived religion—but also in how elements of lived religion can be entangled with heritage making. Various scholars interpret lived religion in slightly different ways, but in general, it inquires into how religion is encountered and experienced and thus puts emphasis on the activities, beliefs, and interpretations of individuals (Knibbe and Kupari 2020). This approach focuses on the fate of religion in modern times and the everyday practices of ordinary people as religious subjects and thus allows one to go beyond the emphasis on official texts and organizations (Hall 1997; Ammerman 2016, 2021, pp. 27–29). For my considerations, especially important is the approach of Meredith B. McGuire (2007, 2008, pp. 13–15; 2016), who emphasizes that an important characteristic of lived religion is its embodied nature, and particularly David Morgan, who rightly noted: “religion happens materially, taking shape as embodied practices that configure the worlds of mortals and others” (2010, p. 15). Things impact the lived experience since religion exists within the material world. I will engage especially with the term “sensational form” by Birgit Meyer (2009, pp. 11–17), because without acknowledging the fact that this icon is experienced through embodied practices, it is impossible to understand its role in shaping religious and social interactions as well as the process of authentication of its complex status.

2. Legends in Past and Present Assemblages

As already noted, I interpret the past and present of the icon as assemblages of various elements that can be parts of several assemblages, sometimes even simultaneously. Seeing its history as a constant process of change and joining new assemblages with humans and non-humans allows us to notice the importance of each element and provides a deeper understanding of the icon’s complex status and context. One element that seems to be particularly important is the legend that was mentioned, in various versions, in most interviews. The icon of Panagia Amirou is connected through legend with the origins of the monastery, founded initially as a male monastery. According to the legend, a man was traveling with his blind daughter, searching for a way to heal her. There is no unanimity among interlocutors in mentioning the legend as to who he was—some say his name was Emiras or Amiras or that he was an emir, something supposed to reference the name later bestowed on the monastery.7 During her visit to Cyprus, the daughter, though blind, noticed a light. They followed the light together and arrived at a cave with an icon and a fresh-water spring. The daughter washed her eyes with the water and was miraculously cured. As a gesture of gratitude, her father built a church on the site, and the local community constructed a monastery. Some versions of the legend contain an additional detail explaining the location of the church: the Virgin Mary told the man to throw down a trowel that miraculously appeared there and build a church where it fell.

According to the faithful and the nuns, the icon found by the daughter is the smaller, inserted icon of Panagia Amirou. Some interlocutors do not mention the spring and claim that it was the icon that cured the woman and restored her sight. Therefore, there appears to be a strong belief in the connection of the icon with the monastery from the very beginning as well as being an important element in its later history. The majority of visitors knew the legend, although only some of them mentioned the miraculous spring, and the identities of the man and his daughter vary according to various versions; yet the icon was mentioned by them all and was connected with the miracle. However, there appears to have been a much greater variation in versions of the legend before 1997, when the monastery was still closed. Rupert Gunnis, an inspector of antiquities for the Cyprus Museum, in his book Historic Cyprus: A Guide to its Towns and Villages, Monasteries and Castles of 1936, described Apsiou and mentioned: “About three miles from the village lies the monastery of the B.V.M. Amyrou. The story goes that a certain rich man who lived abroad found that his sight was fast failing, so he prayed to the Virgin to help him. She appeared to him in a dream and bade him take ship and sail to Amathus in Cyprus, and as soon as he landed he would see a little light on the hills beyond the town. So he sailed from his country, and it all fell out as the Madonna had foretold. Guided by the villagers—his sight was now dim—he proceeded towards the light on the hills. When he reached the place he found that the light came from a lamp hung in a tree. Taking oil from the lamp, he rubbed it on his eyes, and his sight was at once restored. In gratitude, Amaril, for such was his name, built the monastery which is called after him” (Gunnis 1936, pp. 170–71).8 Similarly, in the version written down by Ioannis Sykoutris in 1924, it was indeed the founder who was blind and later cured (Sykoutrēs 1924, p. 81), although he mentioned that the inserted icon was miraculously found by him, even though he was blind (Sykoutrēs 1924, p. 85). This internal diversity within the versions is further confirmed by the recordings of interviews with the oldest inhabitants of various villages conducted between 2007 and 2008, now kept in the Oral Tradition Archive (Aρχείο Προφορικής Παράδοσης) of the Cyprus Research Centre in Nicosia. Recordings mentioning the monastery constituted a valuable addition to my interviews and, since they were recorded earlier, offered a slightly different perspective. In the recording of 2008, a male inhabitant of Apsiou born in 1929 mentioned the foundation legend of the monastery with the miracle of healing the blind daughter of an emir.9 In the recording from the same year with an interview of another inhabitant of Apsiou, a woman then 79 years old, the founder was a Turk, and it was his son, not his daughter, who was miraculously healed of blindness.10 The Turk also appears in the version of an inhabitant (age unknown) of Akrounta;11 for although the blind daughter and the trowel appear, he answers the question as to the icon’s origin as follows: “They brought the icon later. They did not find the icon there” (Μετά έφεραν την εικόνα. Δεν ήβραν την εικόνα εκεί), so in his belief the icon was not connected with the beginnings of the monastery. The legend also appeared in two recordings from 2008 about Mathikoloni. A then-81-year-old man who was born in Mathikoloni mentioned a version of the legend in which the founder was an emir who was sick and later healed.12 Another 80-year-old inhabitant of Mathikoloni told the story in a similar form to the present one, with a blind child, but did not specify whether it was a daughter or a son.13 Therefore, it is possible that there used to be an even greater variety of versions of the legend than there is today.

3. The Status of the Panagia Amirou Icon

The central role of the icon in stories today could be a consequence of a desire to elevate the image’s status. The icon is believed to be from the Middle Ages, and this dating appears to be crucial for the creation of a shared identity by giving this community, consisting not merely of the nuns but also of the inhabitants from nearby villages that feel a special connection to the monastery, a sense of continuity with the monastic tradition, and a connection to the past. As they believe, the icon and the monastery must be from the same time. At the beginning of my research, I was convinced that the reason for this was a deliberate attempt to make the icon the main monastery “attraction”, because heritage can often be regarded as a resource of economic use (Graham et al. 2005, pp. 34–35), but my initial assumptions proved wrong. The nuns, as well as the faithful, genuinely believe in the icon’s connection to the beginning of the monastery and its miraculous powers and feel a special connection to it. The analysis of the vocabulary used for the description of the icon by the faithful revealed that terms used by interlocutors to describe the Panagia Amirou icon cover, for example, “working miracles” (θαυματουργική—thaumatourgikē), “good” (ωραία—ōraia), “very old” (αρχαία—archaia), but most often “our Panagia” or “our icon” (η Παναγία μας—ē Panagia mas; η εικόνα μας—ē eikona mas). One of the interviewees, when asked to explain why she called the icon “mine”, said: “Well, that’s how I feel… that this icon is so mine” (Woman, 60 years old, trans. author). Less common but equally interesting is the term “alive” (ζωντανή—zōntanē). The faithful, however, in having a problem with specifying what they meant by this term, pointed to an undefined type of agency: “[…] when someone puts his hand on an icon and prays to it and says what he feels, Panagia will listen to him” (Woman, 35 years old, trans. author). “She always helps, she always answers […] whatever I ask for, she answers” (Woman, 60 years old, trans. author). These words reveal the intimate relationships people form with the icon. The use of “working miracles” and “very old” seems to reflect the valuing of the icon as both old and miraculous, but the frequency of the phrase “our icon”, together with “our monastery”, suggests that the interlocutors feel connected with the place and the icon that appears to be seen by them as an important part of their locality and identity. It is not possible to tell to what extent the local interactions have been shaped by the ways in which the icon is perceived and by its associated legends, but it seems that they help to create a sense of identity and community by strengthening local bonds, and the alleged old age and miraculous values of the icon are a source of local pride.

Until very recently,14 the icon was still kept in the same place (Appendix A, Figure A2) with a red veil and votive offerings left there by the faithful (Appendix A, Figure A3), revealing a hidden human tendency to organize any relation with the holy as a system of exchange—they are either offered as a request for a miracle or as a gesture of gratitude for miracles performed. One particularly interesting example is a copy of the Amirou icon founded by a woman as an ex-voto for healing her grandson. The icon is kept in a church in the nearby village of Apsiou, but once a year it is brought to the monastery and kept overnight next to the original. A large number of copies are sold at the monastery (Appendix A, Figure A4) and, as emphasized by their owners, are believed to have healing powers and are equivalent to cult objects. It seems they help the faithful meet the need for close, everyday contact with the Amirou icon. Another item sold in the monastery is the official publication of the monastery, where the icon’s numerous miracles are listed and described (Anonymous 2009, pp. 104–21). The icon is an active part of this complex assemblage—the significant attention devoted to the icon in the publication is most likely an answer to the growing cult of the image and the common belief in the monastery’s origin being connected to the icon and largely shaped by the belief in its healing powers. Similarly to the legend, the publication appears to play a crucial role in maintaining the special status of the image for that specific community by reminding one that the history of the icon is allegedly related to the beginnings of the monastery. The status of the icon is complex. It is seen as a visible proof of the monastic tradition—an important part of heritage with a clear historical value for the community that, as already mentioned, consists not only of nuns but also inhabitants of nearby villages that feel a special connection with the monastery. At the same time, the icon is still venerated and believed to be miraculous, so the popularity of the icon among devotees seems to be a result of the combination of the individual search for healing with the creation of a collective narrative. The icon is considered valuable and seen as both old and miraculous, which is worth reflecting upon.

4. Religious Heritage Complex

The importance of the question as to how religious materiality interacts with heritagization processes has been recognized by scholars, but the two processes mainly discussed in relations between heritages and various conceptualizations of the “sacred” are recognized as heritagization of the sacred and the sacralization of heritage, so either placing religious forms within a framework of heritage results very often in the loss of their initial sacrality or the sacralization of what is recognized as heritage (Meyer and de Witte 2013, p. 277; Meyer 2019). It seems, though, that the case of Panagia Amirou goes beyond that since, in the process of heritagization, the icon has not lost its original religious values. On the contrary, it seems that assigning an additional meaning to an icon strengthens its status as an exceptional and miracle-working image, so it appears that seeing the icon assemblage as coming from the past reinforces its religious power. It has been noted that “the boundaries between what is defined as secular and religious are highly contextual” (Niedźwiedź and Baraniecka-Olszewska 2020, p. 5). The process of the heritagization of religion is always complex and contextualized. Scholars tend to create a separation between religious people and other visitors and thus corroborate the secularization process as a key element of heritage analysis, emphasizing the end of the ritual life of objects and sites when they are labeled as “heritage”. However, in reality, as shown by Cyril Isnart and Nathalie Cerezales, “the dialectic between heritage and religion is far more complicated, intricate, and multi-layered” (Isnart and Cerezales 2020, p. 6). The religious heritage complex proposed by them leads us to rethink the relationships between religion and heritage. The heritagization process involves multiple forms of sacrality. As noted by Ernst Van den Hemel, Oscar Salemink, and Irene Stengs, “the heritagization of religious sites and practices, in short, involves complex and sometimes contradictory series of viewpoints, hierarchies of value, and policy traditions. Importantly, these processes play out differently at each site, for each object, for each practice, and in each moment of time on various levels and scales” (Van den Hemel et al. 2022, pp. 4–5). Such objects often have dual religious and cultural heritage qualities that can be seen as paradoxical, but in lived religion, they are far from being so because the rigid division into heritage and religion is not as rigid in everyday practice. In Amirou, the icon is believed to have healing powers and is venerated, but at the same time it is used as a representation of “the past” and a visible proof of the continuation of the monastic tradition. Because of this, I was particularly interested in the individual and communal sense of belonging to a place. The past can provide human existence with purpose, meaning, and value (Graham et al. 2005, p. 34), and heritage strengthens identities at different levels since it fosters feelings of belonging and continuity (Howard 2003, pp. 147–85). As emphasized not only by nuns but also by the nearby populace: “The monastery is as old as the icon” (Woman, 86 years old, trans. author). The concepts of heritage and identity are closely linked with the concept of authenticity, understood as the quality of being authentic, original, or genuine. If any group is building the present from the past, the acceptance of the material with which identity is constructed as authentic is of fundamental importance (Silverman 2015, p. 69). Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the process of authentication of the special status of the Panagia Amirou icon and to pay attention to different levels of this process.

5. Authentication of the Icon’s Exceptional Status

Things are not authentic or inauthentic in themselves; authenticity is defined by certain people at a given time and in a particular context, or, as I prefer to see it, in a particular assemblage. Therefore, during my research on the Panagia Amirou icon, I was not concerned with whether the icon is or is not what it is claimed to be, but instead I focused on why it is valued, what is considered “genuine”, and how its materiality comes into play in the process of authentication. As already mentioned, the concepts of heritage and authenticity are closely linked with identity. Siân Jones has noticed that “the process of negotiating the authenticity of material things can also be a means of establishing the authenticity of the self. However, the effectiveness of this process depends upon people’s ability to establish relationships with objects, and the networks of people and places these objects have been associated with during their unique cultural biographies” (Jones 2009, p. 137). Jones has noted that the materiality of objects is crucial in this process, as is intimate experience or physical contact with them. In analyzing how people experience and negotiate authenticity, her approach neither follows materialist approaches (seeing authenticity as inherent in the object and thus its objective and measurable attribute) nor constructivist approaches (seeing authenticity as subjective and culturally constructed) (Jones 2009, 2010). She claims that authenticity is a product of the relationships between past and present, people, objects, and places: “it is networks of relationships between objects, people, and places that appear to be central, not the things in and of themselves”. (Jones 2009, pp. 136–37). Even though she does not use the term assemblage, her description of the “network” resonates well with the concept of assemblage, where each of their elements, human or non-human, affects or modifies other elements and can be a part of a few assemblages at the same time.

This approach offers the possibility of seeing the process of authentication as an assemblage itself and noticing the importance of each part. We should then try to recognize every element in the process of authentication. The legend not only authenticates the miraculous powers of the image but also authenticates the history of the monastery. It must be noted, though, that it is not exactly the current monastery that the legend is referring to but the previous male monastery. Whereas the name and the place of both of them remained the same, there is no direct continuation since the male monastery was closed for more than a century and the only remaining part is the old church—the rest of the buildings were built after 1997. Nevertheless, there is a strong feeling of continuation—the publication shows the time of closure as an integral part of the history of the monastery (Anonymous 2009, pp. 19–45), and thus the foundation of the previous one is seen as the beginning of the female order that in fact was established relatively recently. It can be seen as creating an “extended history” (Niedźwiedź 2014, p. 89) that is authenticated through the icon together with the legend. It also shows us that tangible and intangible connections between heritage objects, people, and places are crucial for the heritagization process and how closely they are related to each other, since intangible qualities are important in providing objects, buildings, and places with an aura of authenticity (Jones 2009, p. 141). It can even be said that in this case, we face two levels of authentication: heritage authenticity and religious authenticity. Religious understanding of authenticity was taken into consideration by Roberta Gilchrist while analyzing how archaeological evidence has been harnessed by faith communities to authenticate the spiritual authority of sacred sites and exploring the relationship between legends and archaeological evidence (Gilchrist 2020, pp. 187–99). Gilchrist characterized it as “religious concepts of authenticity invest the value of sanctity in material objects, acquired through formal consecration or transferred through close proximity to saints and deities” (Gilchrist 2020, p. 16). The legend not only authenticates the alleged connection of the icon with the beginning of the monastery and therefore its age but also miraculous values by emphasizing the miraculous appearance of the image and the healing power inherent in it from the very beginning.

6. The Role of Processions in the Process of Authentication and Remembering

There is also another performative element serving the process of authentication that deserves careful analysis—processions with this icon. They appear to be another way to recall the miraculous power of the icon and its history. The icon is now used in a number of processions on specific Marian feasts or when the icon’s special help is needed, for example, during drought. Processions culminate with the ritual of passing under the icon (Appendix A, Figure A5). It is held above the entrance to the church by two people as the faithful pass beneath the image one by one to receive a special blessing. It can be noted that many people cry and almost all the participants try to touch the icon, which suggests a deep emotional and sensory connection with Panagia Amirou. The two most important processions take place on the Friday and Sunday after Easter, but there are minor differences between them. The Sunday procession takes place around the church (Appendix A, Figure A6 and Figure A7) due to the large number of participants, whereas the one on Friday, similarly to the processions on certain Marian feasts, is longer. It starts from the church and continues up the hill (Appendix A, Figure A8) towards the place where the icon is believed to have been found (Appendix A, Figure A9). On the way back, it is carried to the gate of the monastery (Appendix A, Figure A10) and back to the church. In fact, the procession might be seen as an “inverted pilgrimage”—this concept, proposed by Stella Rock (Rock 2015, pp. 48–49), though also adopted by other scholars (Niedźwiedź 2015, p. 83), challenges the notion of pilgrimage as an unstructured, extra-liturgical activity and has proposed an interpretation of processions as a form of “inverted pilgrimages” in which icons themselves visit devotees or various places.15 Taking the icon to the place of its origin can be seen as a visual way of raising the status of the inset image by maintaining the memory of the origin of the inset icon and thus of the claimed origin of the monastery itself. Viewing this procession through the abovementioned concept of inverted pilgrimages helps us to notice the crucial role of this performative act and the difference between the procession on Sunday—around the church—and the one on Friday, when the icon itself returns to the place where, according to the legend, it was found. This performative act establishes what is considered authentic—in emphasizing the miraculous appearance of the icon, this acts as a proof of its special status and healing power and leads to the legitimation of the image’s status as being exceptional. While analyzing pilgrimage, John Eade has paid particular attention to how rituals are invented and deployed, creating a relationship between people and the landscape (Eade 2020). This procession also marks the site where something important happened and thus creates a sacred space. At the same time, the procession reminds the participants of the legend itself and the icon’s alleged connection with the beginning of the monastery, and more precisely with the miracle of the healing of the founder’s daughter.16 The legend and processions authenticate both the miraculous power of the icon and its old age.

7. The Power of an Assemblage Form

As noted above, the legend and the procession play a crucial role in the process of authentication and heritagization, but they do not justify the reasons behind the selection of this particular icon and the granting of its exceptional status. The experience of authenticity is linked to the materiality of heritage objects, and there is a possibility that the unusual form of the icon plays a role in this assemblage—the smaller icon seems to provoke the question: “Why is there a smaller icon inside the icon?”. It can be hypothesized that the belief in the uniqueness of the icon and the appearance of the legend is a response to the unusual form consisting of two panels. Due attention should be paid to the role of the material dimension of this icon in this specific assemblage. It must be noted that the inset can be removed from the cavity, but nowadays it is not taken out. The form of the icon is also unusual due to the fact that the smaller icon is hidden behind a two-winged door, of which only a fragment has survived. Since the form allows for such concealment and revelation, perhaps on some occasions in the past, the wings were closed and the smaller icon was hidden from view. The door indeed offers the possibility of revealing or hiding the smaller image, making it accessible not only by sight but also by touch. It seems that the role of touch is crucial in this assemblage and may help to understand not only the need of the faithful to touch the icon during processions. As rightly noted by David Morgan (2010), religion is largely a form of sensation—it consists of embodied practices and is seen, felt, heard, and tasted through material bodily processes. He also noted that “the human body is a plastic medium that forms around the patterned use of things and places” (Morgan 2021, p. 64). Without embodiment, we fail to understand one of the most powerful aspects of the unusual form of this specific icon. As stressed by Birgit Meyer, religion is centered around “sensational forms” (Meyer 2009, p. 13).17 Meyer has emphasized the importance of taking into account the role of the senses and things in the making of religious subjects and communities. This approach allows for seeing religious objects, among them icons, as essential parts in mediating individual and social bodies and the sacred as material culture has the ability to make physically present what is otherwise unseen and in general insensate—sensational forms intermediate believers with the transcendental and provide access to it.18 They are also crucial in creating an “aesthetic formation,” that is a community that comes into being through the circulation and use of shared cultural forms. In her understanding, a community is “not a preexisting entity that expresses itself via a fixed set of symbols, but a formation that comes into being through the circulation and use of shared cultural forms and that is never complete […] in order to become experienced as real, imagined communities need to materialize in the concrete lived environment and be felt in the bones” (Meyer 2009, pp. 4–5). Thus, by using the term formation, she highlights that the making of communities is a dynamic process and indicates the importance of bodies, things, and images in creating those new communities.

Though Meyer does not use the language of “assemblages”, aesthetic formations may be described as assemblages of bodies, senses, things, and practices. She highlights that the making of communities is a dynamic process and indicates the importance of things and images in bringing about those new communities. Her understanding of aesthetics as forms of sensation and modes of perception can contribute to our investigation as it allows one to acknowledge the multi-sensory aspect of the Panagia Amirou icon and its role in this specific social setting. It seems that the nuns and visitors to the monastery of Panagia Amirou can be seen as such an aesthetic formation. This icon evidently embodies for this specific religious community the distant past and acts in a shared imagination, structuring the collective identity centered around the claimed medieval past. This image was gradually to be transformed in the heritagization process into the most important icon and attributed a legend giving an explanation as to its unusual form and authenticating its exceptional status. Both the procession and the icon itself can be seen as sensational forms, so this example shows us that more attention should be paid to the role played by icons and the body in the actual process of heritagization but also in community making. While conducting interviews, I asked interlocutors to describe the icon and explain to me which panel is miraculous. Some of them had trouble answering; some carefully described the theological distinction between an image and the holy prototype and pointed out that the Virgin Mary herself, not the icon, is responsible for the miracles, but some stated that the two panels constituting the icon are not equal: “[…] the smaller icon is obviously more important, because this is the one that was found by the blind daughter and the big one was added later by people to protect it” (Man, 42 years old, trans. author). The question that remains is: who decided to associate this specific icon with the beginning of the monastery? Could the legend be an answer to the unusual form of the image, which contains another icon inside? Then, does it mean that the legend and the status of the icon are not so much the decision of this community but were rather afforded by the form of the icon itself? Those questions, although hypothetical, allow the dynamic assemblages of humans and non-humans to come into view and realize that “agency is always complex agency, unlocalizable and distributed across assemblages of both humans and things” (Hazard 2013, p. 66).

8. Conclusions

Drawing on ethnographic data from the monastery of Panagia Amirou, this article uses the concepts of assemblage and the religious heritage complex to understand the role of the main devotional icon of this monastery in shaping religious and social interactions in this specific place. Instead of focusing on the unusual form of the icon, this study presented its role in the local cultural context. The icon has a rich history, and an important part of the current assemblage is a foundational legend stressing its exceptional status as well as the procession when the icon is taken to the place where, according to the legend, it was found. This dynamism is more evident when we notice that religion exists in the material world where things impact on the lived experience and thus see icons as parts of dynamic assemblages where each of their elements affects or modifies their other elements and can be parts of different assemblages at the same time, having the potential to disassemble and reassemble in different formations with different elements. The icon with its unusual form, as well as the other non-human elements of this assemblage, such as the procession and the legend, can be seen as active. By maintaining the memory of the claimed origin of the icon, and therefore the claimed origin of the monastery itself, they play a crucial role in the heritagization process and authenticate the special status of the image. The current social assemblage of the Panagia Amirou icon illustrates the multivalency of the religious heritage complex—intertwining heritage and religious values—in that the icon is valued as old and connected with the beginning of the monastery, but at the same time as a miracle-working object with healing powers. This special, and indeed complex, status of the icon is authenticated not only by the publication published by the monastery but also by performative elements and embodied practices that play a crucial role in the authentication process.