Easter Holiday and the Pandemic – the Case of Slovakia in 2020
Easter Holiday and the Pandemic – the Case of Slovakia in 2020

Summary/Abstract: This article presents the results of an ethnological study on the current forms of the Christian Easter holiday celebration to recall the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is based on an analysis of data from an exploratory online questionnaire survey conducted in Slovakia in spring 2020. The date of the holiday overlapped with the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research therefore aimed to explore whether and how preventative measures, physical distance, and social isolation influenced the holiday practice which, according to the author’s previous findings, includes not only religious rituals but also profane elements that can be empirically documented at the family, community, and commercial levels. The 2020 pandemic closed the Easter holiday behind the doors of houses and flats, and the analysis thus focuses only the practices related to the family or private space. The research mapped the holiday preparations, common customs practiced at home as well as those that could not be practiced there, custom innovations, and the emergence of new celebration practices. The data analysis is based on the concept of eventisation (Gebhardt, 2000), according to which secularised and individualised ways of spending holiday time influence the pluralisation of contents and the forms of “traditional” holidays. Thus, the survey also aimed to find out how people who do not celebrate it spent the Easter holiday. In addition to particular findings about people’s adaptation to the pandemic, the article also offers a wider ethnological perspective of the transformation of holidays as part of the cultural dimension of social processes in the late modernity period.

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