Living Popular Religion, Social Distancing and an 'Opportunity' for Ethnoarchaeology? The Christian Cult of the Epitaphios in a Pandemic Crisis

Athanasios Vionis of the University of Cyprus delivers a paper co-written with Giorgos Papantoniou of Trinity College Dublin on how the Greek Orthodox Good Friday ritual of the Epitaphios was adapted in Cyprus and Greece during the COVID-19 lockdown of April 2020, and what this response offers to the ethnoarchaeology of religion and crisis.

Vionis begins by distinguishing funerary ritual from funerary cult and tracing the history of the Epitaphios from the Byzantine and medieval periods. Originating as the liturgical veil (aër) covering the Eucharistic gifts, the embroidered cloth depicting the dead Christ took on a narrative and historical role in the late 14th century, as attested by Symeon of Thessaloniki and illustrated by an early 14th-century example in the Benaki Museum showing wear from kissing and touching along its lower edge. The talk examines the sensory dimensions of the Good Friday service and procession: the choral lamentation (Epitaphios Threnos), folk laments (mirologia) recorded in Cyprus, Crete, Paros and Karpathos, and static passion re-enactments on Paros.

Turning to Cyprus, the authors quote Magda Ohnefalsch-Richter's account of Good Friday under British rule and compare it with painted wooden icons of the dead Christ in the Kykkos Monastery Museum. They describe the communal gathering of myrtle, laurel, rosemary, violets and lemon blossom on Good Friday morning, the colour symbolism of the floral canopy, the custom of crawling beneath the bier for healing, and the keeping of petals at home as amulets or medicine.

The second half sets this tradition beside historical epidemics, including the Justinianic Plague of the 540s and the Black Death in the 1340s, which promoted new healing cults such as churches dedicated to St Athanasius in Crete. When churches closed in April 2020, believers in Cyprus and Greece built domestic Epitaphioi from tables, cartons, wire, lace tablecloths, flowers and family icons, displaying them in living rooms or outside houses in places such as Larnaca and sharing photographs on social media. Drawing on interviews, church statements encouraging the early Christian concept of the house-church (kat' oikon ekklesia), and broadcast liturgies, Vionis and Papantoniou argue that relational ethnographic analogy from contemporary crises can inform archaeological interpretation of how past epidemics reshaped domestic devotion and material culture.