What Is a Shrine? A Place Marked Because Something Happened There

Marking a place asserts that something happened at it, that something is present in it, or that something is buried there, and each of those claims makes the location irreplaceable. That is different from a building for assembly, which can be replaced anywhere, and it explains several features of how shrines are treated. They attract travel, since being there is the point and a copy elsewhere will not do, which is what pilgrimage is. They accumulate deposits, since visitors leave objects, and those accumulations become substantial archaeological records. They persist through changes of religion, with the same locations marked successively by different traditions, which is documented repeatedly across Europe and Asia and which indicates that the significance attaches to the place independently of the framework explaining it. And they are contested, since control of a site is control of access to whatever it holds, which is why shrines feature in political and sectarian conflict far more than ordinary places of worship do.

The reasons for marking a location fall into a small number of recurring types:

• •Burial, which is the commonest, with the remains of a founder, saint or ancestor making the site significant and with relics permitting the significance to be distributed
• •Events, where something is believed to have happened, including revelations, appearances, martyrdoms and miracles
• •Natural features, including springs, caves, trees and summits, which are frequently the oldest marked sites and which are marked in many traditions successively
• •Domestic and household shrines, which are the most numerous by far and which mark a place within a home rather than a public location
• •Wayside shrines at crossroads, boundaries and dangerous places, which mark transitions and hazards
• •Roadside memorials at the sites of deaths, which are a large and entirely contemporary category that nobody organised

Marking a place where somebody died has become a widespread practice with no institutional backing and no theology, and it behaves exactly like the older forms. Flowers, photographs, objects and messages accumulate at the site of a road death, a killing or a disaster, they are added to on anniversaries, and they are treated as belonging to the place rather than being movable. Authorities struggle with them, since removing a memorial causes distress while leaving it creates maintenance and safety difficulties, and several jurisdictions have written policies. Comparable accumulations appear at the sites of public deaths, at the gates of institutions after disasters, and around statues and monuments during periods of political conflict. The practice spread through observation rather than instruction, which is the same route the candlelit vigil took, and both indicate that the impulse to mark a location is not dependent on the belief systems that historically supplied the framework for it.

Shrines are destroyed deliberately far more often than random damage would produce, and the reasons follow from what they are. Destroying an irreplaceable site removes something that cannot be rebuilt, unlike a congregation's meeting place. It attacks a community's connection to its own past directly. It is visible and symbolic in a way that other damage is not. Documented examples span every period and region, including the destruction of shrines during religious reformations, the deliberate targeting of sites during recent conflicts in Mali, Iraq and Syria, and comparable destruction of indigenous sacred sites during colonisation and continuing through resource extraction. International law has responded, with cultural property protections in armed conflict and with a prosecution at the International Criminal Court in 2016 that convicted an individual specifically for destroying shrines and mausoleums in Timbuktu, which established that such destruction can be a war crime in its own right rather than incidental damage.

Attaching significance to one location makes it irreplaceable, which is what generates pilgrimage, accumulated deposits and conflict over control. Sites are marked successively by different traditions, which suggests the place matters independently of the framework explaining it. Roadside memorials are a large contemporary version that nobody organised, and deliberate destruction of shrines has been prosecuted as a war crime.