238 Neta B. Bodner Transcending Geography: he Transportation of Sanctity from the Holy Land to the Homeland 1 “Cultural heritage is a group of resources inherited from the past which people iden- tify […] as a relection and expression of their […] values, beliefs, knowledge and traditions”. 2 he quotation is part of the Council of Europe’s deinition of national heritage. Heritage – material or intellectual – is inherited from the past, identiied with in the present, and sustained for the future. An underlying assumption is that a heritage site is witness to a signiicant historical event, and that the form of the site or the construction are visually familiar to the surrounding community. Not only famil- iar but representative, the site or construction is an image symbolizing and encom- passing the historical narrative to which it was a backdrop. Are these criteria truly indispensable for a place to be considered a site of heri- tage? Can people be connected to and identify with, a place they have never seen? In the irst part of this paper I shall argue that in order for people to identify with a place, it does not have to be visually familiar, or personally encountered; that having been to a place, or even knowing more or less what it looks like, is not an indispens- able factor in “seeing” it as part of one’s heritage. he second part will outline how, systematically and all over Europe, sites were deliberately chosen to represent (post factum) events which did not occur in them at all, but hundreds of years before, on the other side of the world. Questions of how and why this was done, and whether the fabricated site was accepted as heritage by the community in which it was erected, will be considered with reference to the “New Jerusalem” in Varallo. A choice of ancestors People are born in a speciic place, with its speciic tradition, history, and local mythology. We grow up to identify with these stories as our own, to see our country’s history as our heritage. In the great majority of cases there is a unity between the country and its mythology; certainly local history is rooted in the geographic locality. 1 his paper and the research that went towards it were carried out as part of a group research project at the European Forum of the Hebrew University, titled “he Holy Land and Europe”. I would like to thank the initiator and leader of this project, Prof. Bianca Kühnel, for her help and guidance. 2 Council of Europe 2005, p. 5.