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Paper short abstract

This paper examines a XIX century Catholic church in Gyumri that lost its function as a sacred place and was transformed into a residential space. It shows how the loss of sacred function produces urban placelessness, while memories of former sacredness continue to constrain everyday life.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the transformation of a nineteenth-century Catholic church in Gyumri through an anthropological framework that integrates relational approaches to place, space, and lived experience. Originally constructed as a sacred locus for the Catholic community, the church underwent profound functional and symbolic reconfigurations during the twentieth century as a result of the 1926 earthquake, genocide-related population movements, Soviet secularization, and post-Soviet urban precarity. From the mid-twentieth century onward, parts of the building were inhabited by families, turning the former sacred interior into a hybrid and contested space of dwelling, memory, and heritage.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral histories, and local narratives of sin, sacrilege, care, and legitimacy, the paper conceptualizes the church not simply as an abandoned or adaptively reused structure, but as a reversed sacred space where religious, moral, legal, and economic regimes intersect. While the church ceased to function as a communal religious place, its former sacred status continues to shape everyday life through moral anxiety, practices of restraint, and ongoing negotiations of legitimacy. Rather than producing a new, stable place, inhabitation generates a condition of constrained dwelling in which sacred memory renders the space only partially inhabitable as an ordinary home.

The case reveals a specific form of urban placelessness, producing an “invisible” sacred monument embedded in everyday life.