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Sacred Places
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Places treated as holy and the regions the traditions come from: temples, mountains, oracles, stone circles and pilgrimage destinations, alongside the cultural regions that produced the systems in the Atlas. Many sites have been sacred to several religions in succession, and the entries record that rather than assigning each site to one owner.
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Scope of This SectionPlaces treated as holy and the cultural regions the traditions come from: temples, mountains, rivers, oracles, stone circles and pilgrimage destinations, alongside the geographic settings in which whole systems arose. Sites are grouped by the tradition that holds them sacred, and a place holy to several traditions is recorded under each claim rather than assigned to one owner. 1 Categories in This Section
A cliff-cut complex of roughly twenty cave monasteries on the Georgia-Azerbaijan border, founded by David Garejeli1A complex of roughly five hundred Buddhist cave temples cut into a cliff near Dunhuang on the Silk Road, decorated across a thousand years of Buddhist art1A gilded granite boulder balanced on a cliff edge in Mon State, crowned with a small stupa said to enshrine a hair relic of the Buddha1A meteorite-impact crater lake in Ghana's Ashanti Region, held sacred by the Asante as the dwelling place of the deity Twi1A monastic and educational centre near Kutaisi, Georgia, founded by King David IV in 1106 and one of the largest medieval Orthodox monasteries surviving today1A monumental shrine Timur built over the grave of the Sufi teacher Ahmad Yasawi in Turkistan, Kazakhstan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 20031A mud pool near Cap-Haitien, Haiti, the site of an annual pilgrimage each late July honoring both the Catholic Saint James and the Vodou warrior lwa Ogou1A necropolis avenue of tiled mausoleums in Samarkand built around the legendary tomb of Qusam ibn Abbas, one of the most important Islamic pilgrimage sites in Central Asia1A pyramidal mountain in County Mayo where pilgrims have climbed in honour of Saint Patrick for over fifteen hundred years, most on Reek Sunday in late July1A rock-hewn Ethiopian Orthodox church cut into a sandstone pillar in the Gheralta cluster of Tigray, reached only by an exposed cliff climb1A sixth-century Ethiopian Orthodox monastery atop an isolated flat-topped mountain in Tigray, reachable only by a rope climb up a sheer cliff1Aboriginal Australian Sites3Abrahamic Sites2An Igbo town in Anambra State, Nigeria, whose excavated bronze ritual regalia and elite burial chamber are the earliest known evidence of a sophisticated Igbo ritual and political tradition1Ancestral Puebloan Sites2Ancient Egyptian (Atenist) Sites1Ancient Egyptian Sites9Ancient Greek Sites10Anglican Christianity Sites3Babi Sites3Baha'i Faith Sites4Buddhist (Chan) Sites3Buddhist Sites38Bulgaria's largest and most visited Eastern Orthodox monastery, founded in the tenth century by the hermit John of Rila, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 19831Candomble Sites1Celtic Sites3Cheondoism Sites1Chinese Imperial Sites1Chinese State Religion Sites5Christian (Byzantine) Sites1Christian (Greek Orthodox) Sites1Christian Science Sites1Christian Sites57Christianity Sites1Confucian Sites3Crow Sites1Dao Mau1Dine Sites1Dogon Sites1Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Sites2Fon (Vodun) Sites1Germanic Sites3Haitian Vodou Sites1Headquarters1Hermetic Sites1Himalayan temple marking the traditional source region of the river Yamuna, one of the Chota Char Dham1Himalayan temple town marking the traditional source region of the Ganges, one of the Chota Char Dham1Hindu (Shakta) Sites2Hindu (Vaishnava) Sites2Hindu Sites23Hinduism (Sapta Puri) Sites1Hinduism (Tamil Diaspora) Sites1Hinduism Sites5Hoa Hao Buddhism1Hopi Sites1Inca Sites3Indigenous (Ohio Valley) Sites1Islam Sites2Islamic Sites22Jain Sites6Jewish Sites21Judaism Sites2Lakota Sites3Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) Sites4Lucumi Sites1Manyika (Shona) Sites1Maya Sites3Mesoamerican Sites3Mesopotamian Sites6Mexica (Aztec) Sites1Mijikenda Sites1Mississippian Sites1Mithraic Sites3Mithraism Sites1Mouride Sufi Order (Islam) Sites1Nabataean Sites2Native Hawaiian Sites1Nazca Sites1New Age Sites1Norse Sites2Omoto Sites1One of the twelve Jyotirlingas of Shiva, on the Shipra River in Ujjain, the only Jyotirlinga whose lingam faces south1Over fifty thousand Buddhist carvings across more than two hundred caves cut into a sandstone cliff near Datong, begun in 460 CE under the monk Tanyao1Palmyrene Sites1Pohnpeian Sites1Polynesian Sites1Prehistoric Sites12Rapa Nui Sites1Rastafari Sites1Roman Catholicism Sites3Roman Religion Sites1Roman Sites4Romano-British Sites3Sacred Site1Sacred Site, Lak Mueang Shrine of Vientiane1sacredsite2Samaritan Sites1Second Temple Jewish Sites2Seventh-day Adventist Sites1Shia Islamic Sites7Shingon Buddhism Sites1Shinto Sites9Shona Sites1Shugendo2Sikh Sites10Sikhism Sites1Spiritualist Sites2Taoism Sites1Taoist (Way of the Celestial Masters) Sites1Taoist Sites4Taos Pueblo Sites1Tendai Buddhism Sites1Tengrism1Tenrikyo Sites1The cathedral in Mtskheta, Georgia, traditionally held to be the burial place of the robe of Christ and the coronation and burial church of the Georgian monarchy1The Cathedral of St. George in Kakheti, eastern Georgia, one of the four Great Cathedrals of the Georgian Orthodox world1The Delhi shrine of the Chishti Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, a major centre of qawwali devotional music since the fourteenth century1The first Buddhist monastery in Tibet, founded around 779 CE under King Trisong Detsen with Padmasambhava and Shantarakshita, its temple complex laid out as a mandala1The head monastery of the Bon tradition, founded in Tsang in 1405, destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and rebuilt in exile at Dolanji, India1The Holy Dormition monastery in western Ukraine, Ukraine's second most visited Orthodox pilgrimage site after Kyiv Pechersk Lavra1The Holy Trinity St. Seraphim-Diveyevo Convent in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia, revered in Orthodox tradition as the fourth and last earthly domain of the Mother of God1The largest ceremonial centre of the southern Maya lowlands, an ancient city of pyramid temples in the rainforest of northern Guatemala, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 19791The largest island in Lake Baikal and its Shaman Rock at Burkhan Cape, held by the Buryat people as one of the most sacred places of Siberian shamanism1The mausoleum and pilgrimage complex of Baha al-Din Naqshband near Bukhara, Uzbekistan, one of the most visited Sufi shrines in Central Asia and the eponym of the Naqshbandi order1The most important working monastery in Russian Orthodoxy, founded by Sergius of Radonezh in Sergiev Posad and today the residence of the Patriarch of Moscow1The national Marian shrine of Cuba, built in 1926 near Santiago de Cuba, and a site of Santeria devotion to the orisha Ochun1The New Kingdom royal necropolis on the west bank of the Nile opposite Thebes, holding over sixty tombs including that of Tutankhamun1The oldest monastery in the Caribbean, founded in 1912 above Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region by Benedictine monks fleeing anticipated persecution in Brazil1The oracle ceremonial centre of the ancient Andean highlands, one of the earliest major religious sites in South America and the type site of Chavin Religion1The oracle sanctuary of the coastal god Pachacamac, one of the most visited pilgrimage centres of the pre-Columbian Andes, on the Pacific coast south of Lima1The ritual capital of the medieval Kingdom of Nri in Anambra State, Nigeria, seat of the Eze Nri priest-kingship and, in Igbo tradition, the place where the founding figure Eri settled1The self-sufficient Rastafari commune Leonard Howell founded in 1940 in St. Catherine Parish, Jamaica, destroyed by a 1954 police raid1The sixth-century tetraconch church above Mtskheta, Georgia, built on the hill where Saint Nino raised the wooden cross that gives the site its name1The Timurid mausoleum in Samarkand holding the tomb of Timur, whose ribbed blue dome and gilded chamber became the architectural model for later Mughal tomb-shrines including the Taj Mahal1The tomb-shrine of a wandering thirteenth-century Sufi mystic at Sehwan Sharif in Sindh, Pakistan, known for its nightly ecstatic dance and vast annual pilgrimage1The walled historic quarter of Harar in eastern Ethiopia, called the fourth holiest city of Islam, holding dozens of mosques and shrines within its walls1Theravada Buddhist Sites1Thirteenth century temple in Odisha built as a colossal stone chariot of the sun god Surya, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 19841Vodun Sites1Western Apache Sites1Western Astrology Sites1Yarsanism1Yoruba Sites3Zoroastrian Sites4 One undivided list of 105 entries.
One undivided list of 5 entries.
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Holy Places and the Regions They Belong To
This section gathers the places traditions treat as holy (temples, mountains, rivers, oracles, stone circles and pilgrimage destinations), together with the cultural regions the traditions themselves come from. It holds both the specific sacred site and the wider region that gives a system its setting.
Many sites have been sacred to more than one tradition in turn, and the entries record the layered history where that is so, rather than assigning a place to a single owner.
Site and region together
Pairing individual sites with the regions that produced whole systems lets a browser move between scales: from a single temple or mountain to the cultural world it belongs to, and from a region to the sites within it. Each site entry gives a location and the tradition or traditions that hold it sacred; each region entry names the area, its modern equivalent where the historical name differs, and what arose there.
The sites group by tradition (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Indigenous and many more), so a reader can narrow from all sacred places to those of one culture.
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