Popular Religion and Material Responses to Pandemic: The Christian Cult of theEpitaphiosduring the COVID-19 Crisis in Greece and Cyprus

Abstract

This article explores the materiality of the Orthodox Christian cult of the Epitaphios on Good Friday of 2020 when, during the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing and isolation were deemed the most effective means of protecting societies from exposure to the virus. Epitaphios is a metonym that references a venerated object, a decorated cloth or wooden icon bearing the image of Christ prepared for burial. It is placed upon a wooden bier, representing the Tomb of Christ, also called the Epitaphios. During the pandemic, people reacted inventively to restrictions imposed on practicing this communal cult publicly in churches by constructing homemade Epitaphioi and displaying them in privately-owned spaces. We examine the materiality of the homemade Epitaphioi in the context of popular religion, evaluating how crisis may divert the forces of the longue durée into a different channel, and how ethnographic analogy may be useful for understanding ritual and cult in archaeology.

Religion and Pandemic: Shifts of Interpretation, Popular Lore, and Practices. An Introduction

“…In turn, Maes shows regarding Jainism how the believers "negotiated the bodily presence" by domesticating the key practices of pūjā and darśan in the situation of the physical restrictions of the pandemic. This last case resembles the Greek Orthodox "domestication" of the Easter shroud (epitaphoi)-the central element of the Good Friday ceremony in Orthodox Christianity-to substitute the "presence" of the sacred in their homes when the churches were closed (Papantoniou and Vionis 2020).…”