From Roman temples to Buddhist shrines in the Chinese desert, these hallowed halls have been abandoned to nature. More than 200 outstanding images show what happens to sacred places when humanity retreats. What happens when the congregation moves away from its place of worship? Or when shifting borders or persecution mean that people can no longer reach their church, synagogue, or mosque? Through magnificent, sometimes haunting images, Abandoned Sacred Places explores more than 100 lost worlds, including ancient and modern temples, synagogues, churches, mosques, and stone circles. Organized geographically, this unforgettable volume wanders from Stonehenge in England and Carnac in France to crumbling inner-city churches and synagogues in present-day Detroit and Chicago, from Mayan pyramids in Mexico to Hindu temples lost in the Indian jungle.

Sacred places are not static entities but reveal a historical dynamic. This volume explores both the cultural developments that have shaped them and their varied multidimensional levels of significance.

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.

Built to last, built to impress, built with style - it is all the more remarkable when grand buildings fall into disrepair and ruination. The reasons for abandonement can be manifold, including political upheaval, economic downturns, shifting borders, changing tastes, natural and man-made disasters. From imperial residences and aristocratic estates to hotels and urban mansions, Abandoned Places tells, in 170 striking images, the stories of more than 130 palatial ruins from across the world.

Sacred Natural Sites are the world's oldest protected places. This book focuses on a wide spread of both iconic and lesser known examples such as sacred groves of the Western Ghats (India), Sagarmatha /Chomolongma (Mt Everest, Nepal, Tibet - and China), the Golden Mountains of Altai (Russia), Holy Island of Lindisfarne (UK) and the sacred lakes of the Niger Delta (Nigeria). The book illustrates that sacred natural sites, although often under threat, exist within and outside formally recognised protected areas, heritage sites. Sacred natural sites may well be some of the last strongholds for building resilient networks of connected landscapes. They also form important nodes for maintaining a dynamic socio-cultural fabric in the face of global change. The diverse authors bridge the gap between approaches to the conservation of cultural and biological diversity by taking into account cultural and spiritual values together with the socio-economic interests of the custodian communities and other relevant stakeholders.

Explores the concept of `sacred' and what it means and implies to people in differing cultures. It looks at why people regard some parts of the land special and why this ascription remains constant in some cultures and changes in others.