Every year on April 23, tens of thousands of pilgrims flock by ferry to the island of Buyukada, the largest of Turkey's Princes’ Islands, in the Sea of Marmara. After arriving, they walk along a narrow path up a hill to a Greek-Orthodox monastery to celebrate the feast day of St. George. They say prayers, perform various rituals and ask for divine intervention, as worshippers do in any other Christian sanctuary. What is unusual and surprising in this case is that most of the pilgrims are Muslims.

Members of the Islamic faith believe that Aya Yorgi, as St. George is known in Turkish, makes no distinction among worshippers and will help them all. If their prayers are answered, they return the following year to distribute lumps of sugar and candies to their fellow devotees. With Jews making the pilgrimage as well, the Church of Saint George on Buyukada is the most prominent case in the Mediterranean region of a sacred site being shared by members of the three monotheistic religions.

“Shared Sacred Sites,” an exhibition at DEPO, a cultural center in Istanbul, recounts situations past and present of cross-cultural coexistence from North Africa to the Balkans to Anatolia. Bringing together photographs, documentaries, devotional objects and other ethnographic materials, the exhibition is a colorful antidote to the essentialist perceptions of the world in black-and-white that seem to dominate public discourse today. It powerfully challenges and undermines the prevailing narrative of us versus them.

Dionigi Albera, an anthropologist at Aix-Marseilles University and one of the curators, told Al-Monitor that a team of international experts had organized the initial incarnation of the exhibition at the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations in Marseilles in 2015. The show attracted more than 120,000 visitors in four months. The organizers had approached the exhibition as a one-off event, but after jihadists killed 22 people in Tunis at the National Bardo Museum in March that year, they received a request from the Tunisian presidency to stage the exhibit there, to send a political message and show of unity in the face of extremism.