The Virgin of Savina : Identity and Multiculturalism

Abstract

The sixteenth-century miracle-working icon of the Virgin Glykophilousa in the Serbian Orthodox monastery of Savina, modern Montenegro, has been the focus of cult and devotions for centuries. A compelling visual presence, it played multiple roles: liturgical, social, legal, and cultic. In each of its roles, it provided support for ethnic and religious identity, being above all a palladium both for believers as individuals and for the Orthodox Christian community as a whole in the complex multicultural and multiconfessional contexts of foreign Venetian rule in the eighteenth-century Gulf of Kotor (Boka Kotorska/ Bocche di Cattaro).