ABSTRACT
There were a number of pilgrimages in the Greek world which were restricted to people of particular ethnic groups, and generally these festivals were of great antiquity. These religious celebrations were open only to Greeks of a specific ethnos ('race'; plural: ethne): for example, the Ionians celebrated the Delia, the Panionia, and in the fifth century, the Great Panathenaia at Athens. The Dorians, too, had at least one pilgrimage site in Asia Minor which, however, only involved five or six cities, while the Boeotians gathered every sixty years in order to celebrate a festival which clearly had, in the pre-classical period, a human sacrifice as its central rite. The pilgrimages which centred on the ethnos stressed not the polis or panhellenism but a group midway between the two, the racial group, such as the ethnos of the Dorians or the ethnos of the Ionians. By their nature, such ethnic festivals did not permit the participation of pilgrims from outside of the ethnic group, and this parallels the prohibitions on certain ethnic groups (Dorians and Aetolians) at particular sanctuaries which will be examined in chapter 6.
