Refugee rituals: continuity and change in the Anastenaria festival in Macedonian Greece

ABSTRACT The Anastenaria festival is celebrated by descendants of refugees from the village of Kōsti in eastern Thrace, now in Bulgaria, who settled in Greek Macedonia by 1924, after the Balkan Wars. The festival is dedicated to saints Kōnstantinos and his mother, Elenē, depicted on holy icons brought from Kōsti. Participants’ primary focus is an ecstatic dance over red-hot coals while possessed by the saint. Proscribed by official Orthodox religion, it was formerly conducted in secret. Though the Church still considers the festival a combination of paganism and Christianity, tension between official religion and the Anastenarides has eased. Based on fieldwork in two villages inhabited by both Anastenarides and other ‘indigenous’ Greeks, this article explores how ritual spaces of the Anastenarides replicate the original space in Kōsti. Belonging to ‘former days,’ cultic practices constitute an ancestor cult linked to their original home, the ‘Thracians’ celebrating their ‘Kōstilidian’ identity through religious rituals.