ABSTRACT
David Lowenthal has said that, to be sure of the existence of the past, you must see its tracks.2 Those tracks may be different natural or man-made objects which fixed history as witnesses of a past event. Through language and other forms of culture, the common experience of history will shape identity. The development of the environment into meaningful places will be expressing itself not just in stories and names, but also through certain marked objects. This means that the landscape which expresses common history plays an important role in the development of identity. Objects, names and stories about occasions create a web of marks and interpretations allowing us to interpret the landscape for different meanings and purposes. To do this, we must know the logic of the web – in other words we must know how the marks and ideas correlate to each other. The importance of holy places is not only that they unite the supernatural and the natural world, but also (and above all) that they connect both of these with the world of the past, of the ancestors and their lives, and they allow us to look at a collective history. Holy
places are not just to be honoured; they are sometimes to be actively used. The natural and the supernatural meet there. Natural holy places – holy groves, holy trees, springs and sacrificial stones – form a major part of the cultural heritage and of folklore and unite historical, archaeological, folkloristic and ecological values. This is why it is no miracle that holy places and their reconstruction are important for the survival of small nations.3
