Of candles and microchips: Transreligiosity, crisis and everyday religion in Greece

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Katohori, a village in northern Greece, this article explores how religion, healing and well‐being practices intersected in the wake of the Covid‐19 pandemic. It focuses on intergenerational responses to the pandemic crisis and its aftermath, highlighting, on the one hand, how younger villagers adopted conspiracy narratives and merged Orthodox idioms with conspiratorial and anti‐secular rhetorics while, on the other hand, older female villagers, usually perceived as spiritually inelastic, engaged in transreligious practices of therapeutic pluralism. Using the symbolic metaphors of candles and microchips to represent the different generations accordingly, the article examines how vernacular forms of religiosity and transreligious epistemologies are shaped, negotiated and transformed. A small northern Greek village emerges as a site of cosmological negotiation that challenges stereotypical representations of rural religiosity in southern Europe, revealing how crisis reshapes religious identity and therapeutic creativity in dynamic, unexpected ways.