Concepts of Purity in Ancient Greece, with Particular Emphasis on Sacred Sites

For this printed version of the paper on Ancient Greece that I had the honor of presenting in association with the workshop ‘Purity in Processes of Social, Cultural and Religious Differentiation’, I will retain the thematic focus on ritual and non-ritual purification of sacred sites. This theme corresponds to my interest in sacrilege, especially acts of violence against and inside religious sites during political disputes, a topic I was able to work on for quite some time. The central theme will be concepts of purity, which were supposed to be sketched out for ‘pre-Hellenic Antiquity’. However, it does not make