An ethnographic narrative from Israel, with its sacred sites marked by war and destruction, explores the dynamics of absence and presence, of imagination and reality of religious dwelling places. This idea of a chapel of placelessness underlies an ethnographic field diary written in the summer 2015 in Israel. Sacred spaces offer their presence built on absence, on layers of cultural memory. The focal point of my diary is the town and the sacred sites of Nazareth, built on the incarnation of the

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... word, and, more concretely, on Mary's house. It is an everyday dwelling place in local narratives, and a centre point of worldwide pilgrimage. Yet, at the same time, the House of Mary is itself imagined as a travelling chapel, absent, but ubiquitously present in innumerable Loreto churches. Etnografska pripoved iz Izraela in njegovih svetih krajev, ki sta jih zaznamovali uničenje in vojna, razgrinja dinamiko o odsotnosti in navzočnosti, o imaginaciji in resničnosti svetih bivanjskih krajev. Zamisli o kapeli brez kraja je podlaga etnografski terenski dnevnik, pisan poleti 2015 v Izraelu. Sveti kraji so ponavzočeni z odsotnostjo, na plasteh kulturnega spomina. Žarišče dnevnika je sveti kraj Nazaret, zgrajen na utelešenju sveta ali, določneje, na Marijini hiši. V lokalnih pripovedih je to vsakdanje bivališče in središčni kraj svetovnega romanja, vendar je Marijina hišica hkrati zamišljena kot potujoča kapela, odsotna, vendar vsepovsodno navzoča v brezštevilnih loretskih cerkvah. Ključne besede: etnografija religije, kraj, sveti prostor, kulturni spomin, praznina I You will bring them and plant them in the mountain of Your inheritance, The place, O Lord, which You have made for Your dwelling, The sanctuary, O Lord, which Your hands have established. (Exodus 15:17) Building a place for God's dwelling: This desire has grasped people's imagination since biblical times, and it might already have motivated the people of Israel on their journey out of Egypt to what they anticipated as "home". Against this background, my paper comes with an invitation to imagine the building of a religious dwelling place, a chapel, of our time. With this, I mean a sacred space made from solid stone, wood and metal, and luminous glass, built on the grounds of past realities and reaching out to imagined future worlds. This imagined chapel is a space composed of images and narratives, of beauty and meaning. Moreover, designing a sacred building leads us to reflect on the qualities of religious practice and performance that would be experienced within this space, on being still, amazed, maybe sad, maybe joyful; of looking, listening, singing maybe, praying, moving about alone, or in a congregation, in liturgy.