Religious tourism is considered as the oldest form of people’s travel. Thousands of years ago people travelled miles led by religious motives. Even though pilgrimage is older than most of the other tourism forms, research on the major motives for religious travel still occupies scientific attention. Vujan Monastery represents one of the main riddles among religious tourism researchers in Serbia. After the mysterious healing of Serbian Patriarch Pavle in 1946 who suffered from tuberculosis, this monastery became one of the most famous sacred places for orthodox Christians. The principle aim of this paper is to propose a new way for exploring and ranking the religious motivation using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach. In addition, the study proposes a set of motives – both religious and secular, which can be applied for exploring the motivations for visiting any sacred site. The method was applied to discover the main motives which drive people to visit Vujan Monastery, get their rankings, as well as their preferences between different types of secular and religious motives. The results indicated a strong preference for religious motives compared to secular motives of visit of this sacred site. On balance, the research provides us with a complete ranking structure, encompassing all analyzed motives of visit which show us a clear picture of the main motivation for visits to Vujan monastery
