Persecution, Refuge, Settlement: A Pattern

All three gongsos share an origin narrative structured by ‘violence’ and a sense of trauma. Surely the ancestors did not choose these locations for their convenience. It was chosen for their illegibility to the state. The mountainous terrain around Yogol Gongso somewhat functioned as natural boundary against royal surveillance during the Joseon-era persecutions. The Yeosaul community survived the 1866 Byeongin Persecution by hiding in forested hollows. And, Yangchon's founders fled to the mountain range, where the landscape itself became their protection.

This is geography surely conscripted into faith. The remoteness that in contemporary times threatens these communities with extinction once guaranteed their survival! And I can understand Smith's concept of 'authorized heritage discourse' finds its inverse here. These are sites of unauthorized survival, places that became sacred precisely because they were invisible to power! The transition from clandestine refuge to registered heritage site, is a trajectory all three gongsos have undergone and that raises the question I keep returning to. What is sacrificed in the move from survival to legibility?

The 1886 Korea-France Treaty nominally ended the persecutions. But at Yeosaul, community memory records something the official timeline cannot capture: even after freedom was declared, believers refused to emerge from hiding.  This was not a theological doubt. It was embodied disbelief, the impossibility of trusting safety after surviving such violence. Trauma operates on its own chronology, indifferent to treaties and proclamations!

Three Sites, Three Textures of Memory

Yogol Gongso: The Decentralised Sacred

At Yogol, the first gongso of my visit, what arrested me was not the architecture (as my colleague Hyoennji on her very articulated pre-visit note informed: ‘a well-preserved wooden structure with exposed M-shaped roof trusses, hipped roof now zinc-panelled, altar to the south’), but the practices the architecture once enabled. This gongso is no longer functioning so we had our meeting with the believers’ community in the nearby community hall. What I learnt from the elder community members was, because of the site's remoteness, priests could visit only once or twice a year. In their absence, when someone required urgent baptism, the Village Chief was authorised to perform the sacrament! This ‘proxy’ baptism represents a remarkable decentralisation of religious authority. This is surely an adaptation born of geographic necessity that became encoded into local ritual practice!

Here is evidence of what I am calling polyphonic heritage operating long before we invented the terminology, as in multiple actors, distributed authority, tradition maintained through improvisation rather than orthodoxy. The institutional church was simply too distant to govern this community's spiritual needs in real time, so the community governed itself! 

The elders also described Christmas and Easter journeys to the main church, requiring overnight stays in the homes of fellow Catholics along the route. These people connected only by shared faith. What I understood from this story that the journey was the community. And the church bell served dual function: liturgical announcement and village alarm. Whether its deaths or fires, the bell rings loudly and everyone responds. A sacred object repurposed for secular emergency! The collapse of religious and civic function challenges assumptions about separated spheres, revealing a landscape where the church was simply there, available to whatever needs arose.

Yeosaul Gongso: Heritage as Absence

Yeosaul, the second gongso of our visit, offered a different texture of memory. The figure of ‘Yi Jon-chang’ somewhat haunts this place. He was an early Korean Catholic believed martyred in 1801. His body was never recovered. The community has identified the family chain, contacted descendants. The grave of him exists, it simply cannot be found. This is heritage as absence, as thwarted longing as Lee Jon-chang's grave is both located (on that mountain, among those descendants) and lost (unlocatable, unmarked)! These are not contradictions to be resolved but multiplicities to be preserved!

What converted 80% of the village to Catholicism, according to residents, was not doctrine but rice. What I learnt that Yi Jon-chang's family, being nobility, distributed white rice to the poor in an era when most survived on barley. Religious conversion enabled through material reciprocity, faith communities built on the memory of being fed! The theological implications interest me less than the social mechanics as how charity created bonds of loyalty that protected the faith through persecution!

The architecture itself encodes indigenous knowledge. The community contrasted this with another gongso where carpet installation blocked natural ventilation and accelerated deterioration. Here is living proof that traditional building knowledge, transmitted through practice rather than documentation, holds solutions we are only now learning to value!

Yangchon Gongso: The Materiality of Continuity

The final visit, to Yangchon Gongso, offered perhaps the most striking lesson in material heritage. The current building is not on the original church site but is built from it. When the parish headquarters relocated to Hapdeok in 1899, villagers salvaged the frames, windows, and other materials from the original structure and reconstructed them on the present site! The old-fashioned windows visible today are original relics from that first cathedral!

This concept of material salvage carries profound implications for understanding authenticity. The 'authenticity' here is not of place but of substance and faith, the same timbers, shaped by the same community, serving the same sacred function across different locations. Western conservation orthodoxy, with its emphasis on in-situ preservation, struggles to accommodate such practices! Yet from the community's perspective, continuity has been perfectly maintained!

Elders as ‘oral historian’ at Yangchon were extraordinary. The elder who witnessed the spear incident was nine years old when North Korean soldiers, retreating in October 1950, encountered villagers armed only with juk-chang. The soldiers fired Soviet rifles into the air, but the villagers had never seen Soviet weapons. They assumed the shots were blanks. This ignorance became courage, instead of retreating, they charged. The weapons misfired, grenades failed to detonate, and armed soldiers were captured with bamboo sticks. The community (and the narrator himself) takes immense pride in this narrative!

An elderly woman described how faith was transmitted through rigorous domestic education! Her mother-in-law would sit before the kitchen furnace, poking the fire with a stick, while the daughter-in-law recited of the catechism. Any mistake met severe scolding! This is how the faith also passed. The same woman revealed she gave birth to her daughter inside the gongso complex, as her house had collapsed, so she lived in the church's side room and went into labour alone! Birth within the sanctuary!! The gongso as more than worship space, it became a shelter, a community hub and morphed into the place where life itself began!