Matter Matters: Sacred Breads and Liturgical Place-Making in St Andrew’s Orthodox Christian Community, Edinburgh
摘要
The chapter aims to explore the role of sacred bread offerings in the liturgical placemaking of a transnational Orthodox Christian community in Edinburgh, Scotland. Investigating theories of belonging, memory and materiality in contemporary cities, it seeks to answer questions related to the absolutely needed components of an Eastern Orthodox worshipping place and how their (re)arrangement in different spaces also reflects the dynamics of its population. Besides the bread used for the Eucharist, that chapter combines primary and secondary sources to also examine the ways other kinds of bread rituals, such as the Serbian slava rituals, generate sacred spatialities. Belonging to the Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the examined parish of St Andrew holds a rather multinational character (with people of 25 different nationalities). Moving materialities such as recipes, and sacralisation of their products become a key component of understanding the architectural rigour of a place of worship for populations that consider Christian Orthodox culture as part of a long established collective identity (i.e. Ukrainian, Russian, Rumanian and Greeks) and converts that are recently received in its context (including a considerable number of locals). Unpacking stories of collective and individual memory, the acts examined here appreciate human participation in the architectures in which they take place reflect processes of settling as becoming key collective spaces for urban minority groups.