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A muslim woman in front of the Virgin Mary's house (c) MP 2010Manoël Pénicaud (IDEMEC – MUCEM)The heterogeneity of the Virgin Mary’s House in Ephesus: a shrine shared by Christians, Muslims and othersThe House of Virgin Mary, located near to Ephesus (Turkey) is one of the presumed scenes of her Assumption. The site of Meryemana was discovered in the 1880s by French Catholic missionnaries, based on the ecstatic visions of the saint Anna-Katharina Emmerich (18th century). Then it was recognized as a shrine by the Vatican in 1896. After a process of restauration, the site was declared “national” by the Turkish government in 1951 and became an important pilgrimage center just after the proclamation of the Assumption’s dogma. But its specificity is that it was spontaneously visited by many Muslims according to their devotion to the mother of the prophet Issa (Jesus).Nowadays, the shrine is international : thousands of pilgrims come from all over the world to visit the last house of Mary. It is still shared by Christians and Muslims, but also by tourists and non-believers. This holy space has became a high place of international, interreligious.According to the anthropological theory about pilgrimages (Eade and Salnow, 1991) and shared shrines (Albera and Couroucli, 2009), this paper will focus on its heterogeneity and on its process of construction. It will be based on ethnographic fieldworks (2004-2011) and on historical approach (archives of the Christian monastery).Paper presented at the MEDNET SCIENTIFIC WORKSHOP 31 Oct. – 3 Nov. 2013European Association of Social Anthropologists'Connecting spaces, constructing places, constituting memories: Comparative approaches in the anthropology of the Mediterranean'