CHAPTER 17 Infrastructures of Interrituality and the Aesthetics of Saint Veneration Rituals Among Orthodox Christians and Arab Alawites in Hatay Jens Kreinath Introduction In July 2015, I attended religious ceremonies for the Prophet Elijah (Turkish: Mar Ilyas) in the only village in Turkey exclusively inhabited by Arabic- speaking Greek Orthodox Christians. 1 Upon returning from the day of celebrations at the sacred site, a remote mountaintop, I joined the elderly leaders of the community in observing the evening service in the main church. During the service, I sat in the back and was able to witness those rituals that devotees perform upon entering the church. An elderly Orthodox Chris- tian performing a specific sequence of nimble bodily movements in front of 1 The Orthodox Christians I worked with speak a local dialect of Arabic as their mother tongue. Although the local parishes of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch (Turk.: Antakya Rum Ortodoks Kilisesi) and all its rural communes follow the Greek Orthodox liturgy, ceremonial acts of worship during the church service are recited in Arabic with the main liturgical scriptures and handbooks written in Arabic (Usluo˘ glu 2012, 122). This is due to the fact that the Antakya Rum Ortodoks Kilisesi is not affiliated to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul—as one might assume—but is itself now a parish of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and All The East with Patriarch John X Yazigi as its primate residing in Damascus and subordinate to the bishop’s see in Aleppo. J. Kreinath (B ) Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. J. Stewart and A. J. Strathern (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Anthropological Ritual Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76825-6_17 345