Hierotopy

Paulo M. Barroso (NOVA Institute of Communication, Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugal)

Hierotopy is a concept developed by the Russian art historian Alexei Lidov to describe the creative and performative production of sacred spaces through the interaction of images, rituals, architecture, light, movement, sound, narrative, and embodied practices (Lidov, 2006; 2014). Rather than understanding sacredness as an intrinsic property of a place, hierotopy conceives sacred space as a dynamic cultural construction generated through symbolic actions and spatial experience. In this perspective, space is not merely represented but actively produced through aesthetic, ritual, and narrative processes. Hierotopy, therefore, shifts attention from the material site itself to the performative mechanisms through which places become symbolically charged.

As Lidov explains in “Hierotopy. The creation of sacred spaces as a form of creativity and subject of cultural history” (2006), the term “hierotopy” consists of two Greek roots: hieros (sacred) and topos (place, space, notion). “The meaning of the notion might be formulated as follows: Hierotopy is the creation of sacred spaces regarded as a special form of creativity, and a field of historical research which reveals and analyses the particular examples of that creativity.” (Lidov, 2006, p. 9).

Many communities, while preserving their devotional and religious practices, increasingly attempt to frame their rituals and sacred objects as forms of cultural heritage (Isnart, 2020). In this context, places of worship, pilgrimage destinations, and religious architecture are understood not only as spiritual environments but also as tourism resources and expressions of cultural identity, distinctiveness, and diversity (Barroso, 2025, p. 20). The demarcation of the territory, which thus becomes a space of worship and corresponds to a hierotopy process (Lidov, 2006), is the creation of sacred spaces viewed as a special form of human creativity. It is also a space sacralization process that takes place with the building of temples, some of them become poles of convergence of the faith, where miracles or hierophanies are believed to have taken place, motivating the visit of pilgrims coming from everywhere, or cruises, oratories, little shrines or memorials, including the wandering of sacred images on portable platforms in religious feasts’ processions (Barroso, 2025, p. 23).

Although originally formulated within the study of Byzantine culture and Eastern Christian visuality, the concept has broader applicability in cultural, spatial, and tourism studies. Within literary tourism, hierotopy offers a productive framework for understanding how literary spaces become symbolically consecrated through acts of remembrance, interpretation, and ritualised visitation. Writers’ houses, literary museums, graves, memorials, literary cafés, fictional geographies, and narrative itineraries can be interpreted as hierotopic spaces in which literature is spatialized and collectively experienced (Herbert, 2001; Watson, 2006).

In literary tourism, the sacred dimension of place does not necessarily derive from religion in a conventional sense, but from symbolic investment, cultural memory, and affective attachment. Visitors frequently engage with literary sites through behaviours analogous to pilgrimage practices, including reverential silence, photography, guided ritualised tours, the acquisition of souvenirs, reenactment of scenes, or emotional encounters with the material traces of authorship (Margry, 2008; Hendrix, 2008). Such practices contribute to the performative construction of literary aura and authenticity. The writer’s desk, bedroom, handwriting, personal belongings, or burial place become relic-like objects whose significance exceeds their materiality because they mediate symbolic proximity to the author and the literary imagination.

Hierotopy is particularly useful for examining how literary spaces operate as environments of symbolic exception. Literary cities such as Dublin, associated with James Joyce, or Stratford-upon-Avon, associated with William Shakespeare, are not simply geographical settings but culturally staged environments where narrative memory reorganises urban perception. For example, during the annual Bloomsday celebrations in Dublin, participants retrace Leopold Bloom’s itinerary, attend public readings and theatrical reenactments, and temporarily experience the city as a lived extension of Ulysses’s fictional world. Through festivals, guided tours, commemorative rituals, plaques, museums, and themed routes, these cities become hierotopic landscapes in which literature structures the visitor’s spatial experience. The same process can be observed in literary trails, where movement through space reproduces narrative sequences and transforms reading into embodied mobility.

The concept also intersects with broader theoretical discussions on space, temporality, memory, and affect. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope emphasises the intrinsic interconnectedness of temporal and spatial relations in narrative, helping explain how literary tourism materialises fictional or biographical time within physical environments (Bakhtin, 1981). “We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84). Likewise, the concept of topophilia, developed by Yi-Fu Tuan, highlights the emotional and affective bonds between individuals and places (Tuan, 1974), illuminating the intimate attachments literary tourists often develop toward imagined or textual geographies. The term topophilia, as Tuan points out, “couples sentiments with place” and, having examined the nature of the sentiment, “we may turn to the role of place or environment in providing images for topophilia so that it is more than a diffuse, unattached feeling”, as the environment may not be the direct cause of topophilia but it “provides the sensory stimuli, which as perceived images lend shape to our joys and ideals” (Tuan, 1974, p. 113). These perspectives collectively illuminate how literary tourism transforms ordinary places into culturally intensified environments where memory, affect, and spatial practice become mutually constitutive. Hierotopy, therefore, contributes to literary tourism studies by emphasising the performative and symbolic dimensions of literary space. Rather than understanding literary tourism merely as heritage consumption or cultural travel, the concept foregrounds the ritual production of meaning, the embodied experience of narrative environments, and the symbolic transformation of ordinary places into culturally sacred landscapes. It reveals how literary tourism operates through processes of spatial imagination, collective memory, and performative consecration that blur the boundaries between culture, ritual, heritage, and pilgrimage.

How to cite this entry: Barroso, P.M. (2026). Hierotopy. In R. Baleiro, G. Capecchi & J. Arcos-Pumarola (Eds.), E-Dictionary of Literary Tourism. University for Foreigners of Perugia. https://doi.org/10.34623/zdg2-hn59

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays. University of Texas Press.

Barroso, P. M. (2025). Intangible cultural heritage in Southern Portugal’s sacred celebrations: Echoes of tradition. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Hendrix, H. (Ed.). (2008). Writers’ houses and the making of memory. Routledge.

Herbert, D. (2001). Literary places, tourism and the heritage experience. Annals of Tourism Research, 28 (2), 312-333.

Isnart, C.. (2020). The enchantment of local religion. Tangling cultural heritage, tradition and religion in Southern Europe. Ethnologia Europaea–Journal of European Ethnology, 50 (1), 39-51.

Lidov, A. M. (2006). Hierotopy. The creation of sacred spaces as a form of creativity and subject of cultural history. In A. Lidov (Ed.), Hierotopy. The creation of sacred spaces in Byzantium and medieval Russia (pp. 9-31). Indrik.

Margry, P. J. (Ed.). (2008). Shrines and pilgrimage in the modern world: New itineraries into the sacred. Amsterdam University Press.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1974). Topophilia: A study of environmental perception, attitudes, and values. Columbia University Press.

Watson, N. J. (2006). The literary tourist: Readers and places in romantic and Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan.