In the spring of 2020, tough measures imposed in the South Caucasus to manage the coronavirus pandemic coincided with some major religious holidays, including Orthodox Christian Easter and Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting. In all three countries of the South Caucasus (Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia), governments called on their citizens to stay at home and not to gather in churches, attend mosques for Friday prayers, visit holy sites or go on pilgrimages. Most religious institutions indeed remained closed and offered online alternatives, such as the Armenian Apostolic Church in Georgia. However, the dominant Georgian Orthodox Church largely continued to hold its traditional services in person. Moreover, despite the government’s exhortations, the churches kept their doors open for Easter celebrations in Georgia, and the government-imposed restrictions were largely ignored by the Church and faithful alike. Holy Communion and the associated practice of using a common spoon for the distribution of wine to communicants were sharply criticized, especially by members of the opposition and the liberal churches, due to the high risk of infection.

This continued adherence to traditional religious practices in churches has cast the special role and authority of the Orthodox Church in Georgia into sharp relief. By contrast, the leaders of Georgia’s Muslims suspended prayer meetings during Ramadan, while the Catholic Church and the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia opted to livestream Sunday services. Despite the increased risk of the virus being spread by traditional religious practices, the Georgian government was reluctant to impose emergency rules on the Orthodox Church. In contrast, in Azerbaijan, all the mosques, churches, synagogues and holy sites were closed on government orders as part of an initial package of measures to control the virus. On 17 March 2020, the Administration of Muslims of the Caucasus (QMI) announced that the faithful had a duty to comply with this decision. The strictly observed quarantine regime remained in force even after the start of Ramadan, which, since 1993, has been regarded as Azerbaijan’s most important Muslim holiday. The breaking of the fast each evening (iftar) took place at home, and restaurants that would have normally served holy food during Ramadan remained closed. The different responses of faith leaders in Georgia and Armenia to coronavirus crisis control measures, as well as variations in how these measures were set and enforced by the respective states, reflect not only the religious diversity of the South Caucasus and differences in the relationship between religion and the state, but also the different tactics religious minorities used to mediate their religious expressions and practices of religious place-making.

This special issue focuses on the ways in which religious plurality unfolds in the South Caucasus and more precisely how religious minorities cope with uncomfortable situations by finding and developing religious spaces and places in the post-Soviet urban environment. Cities in the South Caucasus have had a long history of religiously diverse populations, the presence of which has marked the cities in important ways, including the vibrant presence of multiple, religiously defined neighbourhoods (Humphrey and Skvirskaja 2012). During the socialist period, however, the limitations placed on religion and the support for scientific atheism circumscribed the space for public expressions of religion and the concomitant ability of religion, and of religious diversity, to shape urban environments (Khalid 2007). The ties between religion and ethno-national belonging were strengthened, even though the practice of religion was significantly circumscribed, producing ‘majority’ religions that matched the titular nationalities of the republics, the largest proportions of their populations and religious minorities with other ethno-national-religious backgrounds. While ethno-national identity thrived in urban spaces, public expressions of religion declined dramatically under socialism without ever disappearing entirely.

With the end of socialism, the space for public expressions of religion has increased, including in urban settings. Post-Soviet urban spaces are now religiously shaped and textured in ways that were previously unimaginable. Yet, in the literature, post-Soviet cities have mostly been viewed as secular settings (e.g., Alexander and Buchli 2007). The economic, political and infrastructural changes that accompanied the collapse of socialism and the way this impacted on urban environments and their dwellers has been explored (e.g. Nazpary 2002, Collier 2011, Fehlings 2016). Portraits of chaos and breakdown, followed by depictions of the growth, spectacle, ruralisation, illegality and inequality wrought by capitalism, pepper the literature (Bissenova 2017, Trevisani 2018, Isabaeva 2021). Only recently has research begun to address what is variously discussed as the urban ‘religious revival’, ‘re-sacralization processes’, or the ‘nationalization’ of religious belief and practice in urban spaces (Bissenova 2016, Nasritdinov and Esenamanova 2017, Nasritdinov 2018, Kormina 2020). Much attention has been paid to the dynamics of restoring religious worlds in urban spaces by the largest religions of the former Soviet Union (Orthodox Christianity, Sunni Islam), including the spectacular (re)building of churches and mosques in city centres. Usually sponsored by state agencies, these extravagant buildings now mark and reshape the urban skyline, sitting alongside grand monuments and other urban prestige projects (Bissenova 2016, Serrano 2016, Wanner 2018, Darieva 2020). Pilgrimage, religious educational projects, and missionary endeavours have likewise marked post-socialist cities (Wanner 2012, Darieva et al 2018, Kormina 2020), if in less spectacular ways, as has the rise of pious forms of consumption, like halal-dining, religious fashion shops and beauty salons – particularly urban forms of capitalist leisure (Kapustina 2016, Stephan-Emmrich and Mirzoev 2016, Bissenova 2017, Nasridtinov and Schröder 2017, Puppo and Schmoller 2020).

One of the most widely shared characteristics of religion across many post-Soviet societies is the tension between the right to religious freedom on the one hand and the revitalisation of religion as an aspect of post-Socialist nation-building on the other. Both have impacted on urban landscapes and make for a new and variegated presence of public religion. Relative religious freedom has facilitated the growth of minority religions, including those practiced by long-standing, internal religious minorities, and of smaller, newer religions in the region. At the same time, this growth in minority religions is being challenged by the revitalisation of religion as an aspect of post-socialist nation-building and the incumbent re-establishment of religious infrastructure, including grand churches and mosques in the main cities, of official religious education in urban centres, and of religious and national symbolism in urban public spaces (Serrano 2016), all of which mark urban-cum-national landscapes and their national actors as belonging to the majority religion (Wanner 2020). Giving new significance to post-Socialist elites and to the reconfiguration of national identities after socialism, public displays of religious piety and religious processions are often used as tools of maintaining political regimes (Serrano 2015, Koch et al. 2018, Tateo 2020). Within these frameworks, current debates on the return of religion often remain too bounded in the national heritage paradigms of one specific country and one specific religion. This methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) precludes attending to minority religions and religiously plural environments. Taking a comparative view and systematically investigating religious diversity in urban spaces as a modern condition and everyday experience remain largely unaddressed topics.

Only recently has there been an interest in diverse experiences of urban religious presence and lived religious multiplicity (Burchardt and Becci 2013, 2016, Mahmood 2015, Meyer 2020) as contributing to the construction of urban identities, but this has largely come from research outside the former Soviet world. Emerging research on post-socialist societies offers fruitful ground for further investigation. For example, as mentioned above, research on religious consumption and entrepreneurship (halal shops, pilgrimage infrastructure, faith-based fashion and lifestyle) sees religious observance as going beyond state-sponsored religious institutions and the domestic sphere to become an aspect of modern urban living (McBrien 2009, Stephan-Emmrich 2018, Bissenova 2017, Puppo and Schmoller 2020). Religious pluralization is emerging beyond the mainstream national faiths that are unfolding in urban spaces, producing a set of challenges for local administrations, normative orders and majority perceptions. This includes the negotiation of religion’s ‘proper’ place in the urban environment – another field ripe for investigation.

In general, there is a lack of exploration of religiously diverse experiences in post-socialist cities, and especially in the South Caucasus. These urban centres are arenas for manifestations of multiple faiths and are shaped by both local and global forces, as well as the effects of neoliberal and authoritarian rule. Urban spaces are the sites in which practitioners of multiple faiths, including minority religions, work out their religious lives. They are likewise spaces where claims to national belonging, heritage and property are negotiated and contested, a complex process, especially in light of the sway of institutionalized religion-state relations and spatial frameworks dominated by the secular authorities and mainstream religions. The institutionalization, regulation, and management of religious plurality on the one hand, and the ways diverse practitioners appropriate their places of worship in post-Soviet cities on the other, reveal novel forms of religious expression and control. In addition, they draw attention to the place-making functions of religious practices as mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion, to the local ‘situatedness’ of minorities, and to supressed spiritualities and alternative forms of urban religiosity. Finally, they raise questions about how religious minorities are turned into new ‘strangers’ in the city, the nature of their symbolic and material resources, and the extent to which their visible or non-visible materiality and religious practices contribute to spiritual co-existence or tensions.

This special issue brings together five fresh ethnographic studies of minority religions in post-Soviet urban spaces, examining the range of negotiations and struggles that practitioners face in the multireligious cities of the South Caucasus. Looking at a variety of religious minorities in Georgia and Azerbaijan, this special issue contributes to debates on faith in post-socialist countries by shifting the gaze to religious minorities, and by looking in particular at urban environments and their power relations. These cities offer fruitful arenas for the study of the dynamic, but often uncertain and nearly always contested nature of religious pluralization in a borderland region. In these post-socialist urban sites, negotiations and struggles for religious spaces merge with the Soviet legacy of secularism, post-industrial cities and national ideologies to create complex terrains for the making and living of religious lives.