Accepted Panels

The health crisis caused by COVID-19 has forced many people around the world to devise strategies to help them through unprecedentedly hard times; and religion has played a remarkable role in redressing negative impacts of the pandemic. Certain archaic practices that are believed to have completely vanished from our modern societies seem to be present in the everyday lives of supposedly ‘modern’ people. The COVID-19 virus was first confirmed to have spread to Slovakia on 6 March 2020. The Delta variant of COVID-19 hit Slovakia hard in a third wave at the end of 2021, when the country witnessed one of the highest numbers of positive cases relative to the population worldwide. The paper presents a study of news articles and social media reporting on religious and spiritual healing activities during the pandemic. Articles on the topic were gathered during 2020 and 2021, when Slovakia faced a series of waves of COVID-19 and restrictions were imposed. The media can hardly be considered a new subject for anthropology. Investigation of content from a variety of print media, television, and other broadcasts, compared to classical ethnographic methods (such as face-to-face communication or participant observations), can give anthropologists particular insights into cultural and collective patterns. Religious responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia and other Western countries have been diverse and range from the use of prayer and different rituals to the veneration of saint relics. This paper looks at how different religious and ritualistic therapeutic resources have provided mechanisms for coping with the consequences of COVID-19 in Slovakia, a country located in central–eastern Europe. It presents insight into the cultural responses of one country during lockdowns and simultaneously challenges the self-identification of the West as the epicentre of rational thought.