In addition to its important associations with Abraham, Hebron has been regarded by some Muslims as the site of a stopping point along Muhammad's miʿrāj, or miraculous night journey to Jerusalem; as a result, Hebron has long been a significant site of pilgrimage.
A significant centre of pilgrimage, it is used mainly by Russian speakers and ethnic Russians.
Categorising pilgrimages as either sacred or secular begins to seem unimportant if they all ultimately deal with individuals' sense of self and their relationship to others, and we are missing something significant if these rock pilgrimages are simply dismissed as frivolous fun.
It is significant that Communists make pilgrimages to the graves of Lenin and Marx; and, in the modern State of Israel, great effort is being made to record in the shrine of Yad va-Shem the names of those who died in the persecution of the Jews in Germany during the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and '40s and, if possible, to bring their ashes there.
Around 500 horses do make it, watched at the track by more than 220,000 people - a significant proportion on an annual pilgrimage from Ireland - with millions more following on radio and television.
The chronicle relates that upon gaining his freedom, Óláfr met with Rögnvaldr on Mann, and then set out on a pilgrimage with a significant number of noblemen.
During the colonial era, metropolitan France was a regular stop on the educational, intellectual and journalistic pilgrimages of a small but significant body of Vietnamese elites.
Accordingly, pilgrimage to these sites is a significant part of religious life for many individuals seeking a more visceral and immediate connection to the sacred.
Nearby, the beach resort of Matalascanas and the pilgrimage town of El Rocio siphoned off additional significant water.
My beautiful cemetery was in Koyasan, a spiritual capital where we concluded the first day of our nine-day trek along the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage route, a path that's so significant it's one of only two recognized by UNESCO (the other is the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and walkers get pilgrimage "passports" to stamp at stations along both routes).
Note that crowd disasters during religious pilgrimage in the past recently led to important insights and also to significant improvements of crowd management and control [12 16].
