A City of Stone the World Has Recognized

Pohnpeian traditional religion binds a chiefly order, in which title, feast and the presentation of first fruits carry religious weight, to clan and ancestral spirits attached to particular places on Pohnpei and its reef. Ceremonial authority rests with title holders and with the communities that grant those titles, and this article does not set out the observances that authority governs. What is public, and now recognized on an international stage, is Nan Madol, the complex of close to a hundred artificial islets built of columnar basalt off Temwen Island, seat of the Saudeleur dynasty that once governed Pohnpei from it.

Nan Madol was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List, an international acknowledgment of the site's significance that rests on its extraordinary architecture and its documented history rather than on any account of the living religious practice still tied to particular places on the island. The site's mortuary and residential sectors, built up over centuries, are open to study and to visitors in a way the tradition's active ceremonial life is not, and this article keeps that distinction. Pohnpeian religion remains a living system today, carried by title holders and communities whose authority over their own ceremonial life the atlas records without describing.