Places in your area where people go on pilgrimage

[jerzybg]

Koden is a small town in Eastern Poland, in my area, where people go on pilgrimage in August to worship Virgin Mary in The Marian Sanctuary.
Are there any places in your area where people go on pilgrimage?

 

[Quiddity]

I'm not really familiar with any in my area, but back in Mexico there is plenty.

BTW, your use of the word "worship" has me a bit concerned. Can you clarify what you mean?

 

[Djamila]

Medugorje (Between the Hills), a small town in southwest Bosnia and Herzegovina, is one of the most important Roman Catholic shrines in the Balkans. More than 30,000,000 have visited the Virgin Mary's shrine in Medugorje over the last 25 years – a place where many Roman Catholics believe the Virgin Mary appeared, numerous times, passing messages of peace to a group of Bosnian youth.

That's the main Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in an international, purely religious sense. Bosnian Roman Catholics, though, have countless other sites where pilgrims congregate.

These include towns like Kraljeva Sutjeska, the home of Bosnia and Herzegovina's last Queen (Katarina Kosaca-Kotromanic) who is known locally as Saint Catherine by Catholics and Catherine the Great by other Bosnians. There are towns with historic important Roman Catholic religious institutions - be it an old, wooden Church or a Monastery. These include Plehan, Vares, Fojnica, Travnik, Jajce, Bihac, Sarajevo, and others.

 

[jerzybg]

Victor, you are right, I should have written "venerate" instead of "worship".

As to Medjugorje, 19 people died on July 1st 2002, when a bus carrying Polish pilgrims on a religious pilgrimage to that place crashed near Hungary's Lake Balaton.
Three of them were from my area. Nobody from my area wants to go there.

 

[Djamila]

As to Medjugorje, 19 people died on July 1st 2002, when a bus carrying Polish pilgrims on a religious pilgrimage to that place crashed near Hungary's Lake Balaton.
Three of them were from my area. Nobody from my area wants to go there.

I remember you mentioned that in your comment about a picture of Medugorje I uploaded to the gallery. It's dangerous to leave a country like Poland and drive through the Balkans - highways standards are much lower and travel is really very dangerous, all of Europe's deadliest highways are in the Balkans.

It's best to fly to Croatia or Bosnia and then travel by train to Mostar (in Bosnia). There you can get several daily bus runs to Medugorje, by local companies that know the routes and are much safer.

I realize anyone reading this is probably thinking, "Accidents happen" - but, seriously, I promise you from the bottom of my being that driving on highways in the Balkans is akin to playing Russian roulette in many regions.

 

[FatMan]

On Sunday mornings in my area, the place they pilgrimage to is called Cracker Barrel.

 

[Katzpur]

Visiting Salt Lake City is a goal of many Latter-day Saints outside of this area. I don't know that I would describe their efforts to come here as a "pilgrimage," but I guess some people would think of it that way.

 

[James the Persian]

There are plenty of places around me, the majority of British saints being old and so common to both churches. There's York, for instance, big for us due to the St. Constantine connection). There's Whitby, where there was monastery founded by St. Hilda and which produced a number of saints (for us the word monastery is used regardless of the sex of those within it, in case you're confused) and there are plenty of other places also. In fact, not far from our church is the spot where St. Paulinus (a disciple of St. Augustine of Canterbury) mass baptised the local population in the river. I wouldn't say that many people here actually do pilgrimages, though. We do, though we're not exactly thick on the ground, but I've never seen even high church Anglicans do them and for some reason all the RCs I know seem to think going on a pilgrimage means leaving Britain for somewhere like Lourdes.

James