Though long-associated with violence, the Caucasus is a region rich with spirituality. Based on fresh ethnographies and studies of sacred sites in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia, Sacred Places, Emerging Spaces discusses vanishing and emerging sacred places in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious post-Soviet Caucasus. In exploring the effects of de-secularization, growing institutional control over hybrid sacred sites, and attempts to review social boundaries between the religious and the secular, these essays give way to an emergent Caucasus viewed from the ground up: dynamic, continually remaking itself, within shifting and indefinite frontiers.

"This volume shares in a rich resurgence of writing on religious activity across the former Soviet Union and particularly in areas of the Caucasus, offering sharp insight on arguably most popular religious traditions-surrounding shrine pilgrimage-about which we know the least of all. The editors have gathered the highly qualified scholars for the task, including a number of specialists from the Caucasus proper." * Bruce Grant, New York University

Tsypylma Darieva is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at Humboldt University Berlin, Institute for Asia and Africa Studies. She is the author of Urban Spaces after Socialism: Ethnographies of Public Places in Eurasian Cities (Campus, 2011).Florian Muehlfried is affiliated with the Caucasian Studies Program at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. Previously, he was a guest lecturer in Georgia, a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a visiting professor at UNICAMP, Brazil. He is the author of Being a State and States of Being in Highland Georgia (Berghahn, 2014).Kevin Tuite is Professor of Anthropology at the Universite de Montreal. He also directed the Caucasus Studies program at the FSU-Jena from 2011 to 2014. His publications include the Language, Culture and Society: Key Topics in Linguistic Anthropology (co-edited with Christine Jourdan) (Cambridge, 2006).