Everything could be shared, except the name of God

There is a monastery in Montenegro, carved into a vertical cliff face, where the queue of pilgrims tells you almost nothing about who believes what. Ostrog is an Orthodox site; the saint who rests inside, Sveti Vasilije, is Orthodox; and the liturgy sung there is Orthodox. And yet every year, thousands of Muslims from Montenegro, Bosnia and Kosovo climb the mountain, stand before the reliquary, and pray for healing in their own words, in their own way.

At Ostrog, nobody finds this strange. These scenes are the product of centuries — not untroubled centuries, but real ones.

I wrote earlier for New Eastern Europe about the songs that outlived the borders drawn across the peninsula. This is a story about something that ran even deeper than the songs: the shrines, the springs, the saints and the spring festivals that two faiths held in common — often without ever agreeing on what, or whom, they were actually venerating.

The same figure, two names

The Balkan folk imagination never asked its holy figures for doctrinal papers. Instead, it asked them for results.

That is why, across the peninsula, Christian saints and Muslim dervish-saints were quietly drawn toward one another, wherever their powers or their stories rhymed. The best known of these convergences is Hızır and Saint George. They are not the same figure theologically, and never were. But for Christians, George is the dragon slayer who heralds the spring. At the same time, for Muslims, Hızır is the immortal helper who arrives when all other help has failed. Both stand for the awakening of nature, the return of green, the renewal of life. The calendar accomplished what theology never attempted: it fused their feast days into a single Balkan spring. On May 6th, Muslim Bosniaks light fires for Hıdırellez while Orthodox Serbs and Macedonians gather at riversides for Đurđevdan, and the rituals — water, greenery, fire, wishes for fertility and abundance — flow into one another until the theological labels become almost invisible.

The second great example belongs to Sarı Saltuk, the wandering Bektashi dervish who stands at the heart of the Balkans' Islamic folklore. His legend — including, tellingly, a dragon slaying of his own — overlaps to a striking degree with the miracle stories of Christian saints. What happened at the monastery of Sveti Naum on Lake Ohrid, however, was less a fusion than two sacred readings of a single grave. Bektashis counted the tomb among the resting places of Sarı Saltuk, while Christians went on seeing Sveti Naum in the very same stone. Each community bowed to it through its own faith.

And the shrine did not insist on a choice.

Even scripture itself provided common ground. The “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus” appear both in Christian tradition and in the Quran as the Ashab al-Kahf, the “People of the Cave”. This is a story alive in two scriptures at once, which lent cave shrines across the Mediterranean and the Near East a shared vocabulary of the sacred.

Under one roof

Sometimes the sharing was not metaphorical at all.

In Makedonski Brod, in North Macedonia, a single building houses both the Orthodox church of Saint Nicholas and the tomb venerated as that of Hıdır Baba. Candles flicker before icons and hands open in Muslim prayer beside the saint's tomb under the same roof. Scholars of religion cite it as one of the clearest examples of a “shared sacred site” anywhere in the world. The villagers who use it need no such vocabulary. The roof above them is the same roof, and it always has been.

In south-eastern Albania, where Bektashi Islam and Orthodox Christianity lived side by side for centuries, researchers have recorded sacred places the locals call “vakëf”: spots belonging fully neither to the church nor to the tekke. These are hilltops, ruins and springs open to the vows and visits of both communities. Albania in this sense was a kind of laboratory: proof of how long two liturgies could share one landscape.

And there is Ostrog, where I began: a strictly Orthodox monastery that became, in practice, one of the great pilgrimage destinations for Balkan Muslims as well. The Muslims who pray at Sveti Vasilije's reliquary do not become less Muslim by doing so. They are doing what Balkan pilgrims have always done — going where the power is believed to be, and addressing it in their own language.

Nor was the roof ever held up by two communities alone. My own family's roots reach back to Salonica, and few cities show better how many hands the peninsula's memory passes through. Its large Sephardic Jewish community shaped the rhythm of the port, the language of the streets, and the cultural life of the city for centuries. For Orthodox Christians, it is the city of Saint Demetrios. And for Turkish Muslims, it remains a place of origin and quiet longing: the birthplace of Atatürk, and of the muhacir families — mine among them — who carried the city’s memory across the Aegean. Few cities in the region were so deeply inhabited, remembered and loved by three religious communities at once. In Sarajevo, likewise, Sephardic Jews lived so thoroughly woven among their Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox neighbours that the city's most treasured relic became a 14th-century Hebrew manuscript, the Sarajevo Haggadah. This document has been guarded, at the worst moments of its history, by hands of every faith. Catholic communities, above all Bosnia's Franciscans, preserved their own institutions and devotional landscapes throughout centuries of Ottoman rule, while smaller Evangelical communities added another voice to the peninsula's religious map. The peninsula was never a duet; it was a chorus.

The grammar of shared devotion

Look closely at these places and a common ritual grammar emerges, one that pays little attention to confessional borders.

There are the “ayazmas” — the healing springs found beside so many Balkan churches and türbes. A Muslim woman who could not conceive would drink from a Christian ayazma, while a Christian mother with a sick child would fetch water from a spring beside a dervish's tomb. Nobody considered this a conversion. It was simply the location of the water.

There is the traffic in prayers themselves. In western Macedonia, priests describe Muslims coming to church for holy water, blessed icons and prayers for abundance. Visits in the opposite direction also appear in the ethnographic record. Healing was a service in the village economy of the sacred. The question was never whose God provided it, but whether it worked.

And there is the etiquette of the visit itself. Christians entering a Muslim saint's türbe left strips of cloth and handkerchiefs, as they would at their own holy places. Muslims entering certain churches stand before the icons and pray in their own manner, honouring the sanctity of the space without adopting its doctrine. This tradition survives spectacularly today at Aya Yorgi on Büyükada near Istanbul, itself a living fragment of this Balkan palimpsest. Each side kept its own theology at the door and brought only the thing the shrine was actually for: the request.

Tie a rag to a tree. Make a wish on Hıdırellez. Wear the martenitsa on your wrist and hang it on a branch when the first stork appears. The faiths differ but the gestures are the same. This is because the same mountains, the same rivers and the same wind have been shaping these people into a single culture for centuries.

What made it possible

None of this grew out of doctrine, and very little of it grew out of what we would today call tolerance as an ideal. It grew out of the street.

In the mixed villages and mahallas of the Ottoman Balkans, religion lived inside the house while the street belonged to everyone. The region still describes this reality with reverence: komšiluk, the law of neighbourliness. In Bosnia they said that a neighbour comes before religion. A Muslim attended his Christian neighbour's wedding while a Christian stood quietly at his Muslim neighbour's funeral and ate the halva. When harvest came, or fire, or flood, the village responded as a village — because in that world, no household survived alone.

The Ottoman order, for its part, gave this everyday intimacy a frame in which it could grow. It managed religious plurality through a flexible, pragmatic legal and administrative structure. Under the millet system, each community conducted its religious life under its own leadership. Throughout that centuries-long arrangement, it left the shrines open, the springs unfenced, and a calendar shared at the local scale. The people of the peninsula did the rest.

For the folk religion that flourished in this space, what mattered was never the theology a shrine officially professed. What mattered was the healing and the protection it was believed to offer. That is the quiet engine behind every example in this essay: not syncretism as a doctrine but hope as a practice.

Let us not hide the other half of the truth: this sharing was never frictionless. The same shrine can create rivalry as easily as communion, and when politics hardens, it is precisely these multifaceted places that are first claimed for one side. The 20th century supplied the starkest proof of how quickly a shared landscape could be unmade — and, on one occasion, of how it could be unmade all at once. In 1967, Albania declared itself the world's first atheist state and closed or repurposed more than two thousand religious buildings — mosques, churches and tekkes alike, with a grim even-handedness. The government turned those surviving buildings into gymnasiums, warehouses and cultural centres. The same hillside vakëf that had welcomed the vows of two communities now lawfully belonged to neither; even prayer at home, of any faith, became dangerous. This amounted to an inversion of the shared sacred landscape: everything held in common was erased in common. And yet the regime fell, and the reverence did not: the doors reopened, the vows resumed, and the old shared sense of the sacred proved more durable than the decree that tried to erase it — as it will prove again, wherever it is tried. That is exactly what makes the Balkans' shared sacredness so remarkable: it exists despite being fragile.

Honey and blood

There is a folk etymology — linguistically simply wrong, since the term balkan in Turkish means a steep, forested mountain chain — that is nonetheless too apt as a metaphor to resist. This is namely reading the peninsula's name as bal and kan, or honey and blood. A culture as sweet as honey, and a history that, sadly, never lacked for blood. The shared shrines, the shared springs, the shared spring fires — these were always the honey.

Perhaps the task now is to leave a different inheritance. If the hands still rise toward the same sky, and the prayers are still made for the same hopes, then let this generation make one wish together: that never again on this peninsula should any faith, any identity, any flag be valued above a human life.

And let the Balkans, from now on, be known only for what was always shared — the culture, the memory, and the prayers.

Tunacan Tuna is an Istanbul-based cultural journalist and researcher focusing on Balkan and Ottoman cultural heritage. His previous essay for New Eastern Europe, “Even After the Borders Were Marked, the Songs Remained”, appeared in June 2026.