Exhibition: People, Piety, and Sacred Power in the Eastern Mediteranean

Since the Middle Ages, the Orthodox faithful in the eastern Mediterranean area have expressed their piety in the form of images, words, objects, and monuments. They built and decorated places of worship, inserting images of themselves or loved ones as supplicants before Christ, his mother, and the saints. They inscribed prayers and dedicated offerings that range from precious liturgical objects to wax figures of people and body parts. These photographs illustrate human interactions with the sacred in Jerusalem, Istanbul, Sinai, Cyprus, and Greece. From the magnificent Hagia Sophia to paintings of individuals in a humble village church, these pictures document the ways in which Orthodox believers sought, and still seek, to proffer piety in the hope of meriting sacred power.