Romanian Media Coverage of the Bringing of the Holy Fire from Jerusalem. Tradition, Rituals and Media Events
Romanian Media Coverage of the Bringing of the Holy Fire from Jerusalem. Tradition, Rituals and Media Events

Summary/Abstract: This study analyses how the media covered the event of bringing the Holy Light from Jerusalem for the first time to Romania during the Orthodox Easter in 2009, and how the ritual and tradition associated with this fact were constructed. The paper is structured on two intertwining axes. One analyses the bringing of the Holy Light from Jerusalem from the perspective of the media event (Daniel Dayan, Elihu Katz, 1992; 1980; Coman, 2011; 2008), and the second follows the description and analysis of the ritual of bringing the Holy Light from Jerusalem from the perspective of the phenomenology of religions developed by Mircea Eliade – the concept of heterotopia, formulated by Alexei Lidov, and the construction of tradition from the perspective of Catherine Bell. To identify major themes and dominant symbols, I used content analysis, and for ritual analysis, the interpretive method. The concepts “holy light”, “charitable light” and “holy fire” define the fire that miraculously ignites on the Saturday before Orthodox Easter in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. “Bukovina” is a historical region divided between Romania and Ukraine, the southern area forming most of Suceava County. Here the concept is used to illustrate the whole Suceava county. “Jerusalem of the Romanian people” refers to the Putna Monastery, where the tomb of Stephen the Great was canonised in 1992 as “Righteous Voivode Stephen the Great and the Holy”.The results show that bringing the Holy Light from Jerusalem to Romania meets the characteristics of a media event, in the Dayan-Katz paradigm. The initiative to complete a religious holiday with a new ritual came from political power, taken over by the religious authority, which later ruled out political interference.

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