In October 2020, the pilgrimage to the relics of Saint Parascheva in Iași, Romania, took place under COVID-19 restrictions. Ethnographer Mustafa Yakup Diktaş observes that pilgrims ordinarily queue for hours before reaching the relics and that the line itself is a defining feature of the contemporary pilgrimage.
That year, authorities limited access to residents of Iași and checked identity documents at the perimeter. For a believer, the queue could be time directed towards an encounter with a saint. From a public-health perspective, it could be prolonged proximity capable of transmitting infection. The same arrangement acquired opposite meanings: a path towards a miracle and a path along which contagion might travel.
Quality check: New Europe College research specifically analyses the ordered relic-veneration queue and infection controls at the 2020 Saint Parascheva pilgrimage in Iași.