How did religious heritage sites help Acehnese communities cope with the COVID-19 pandemic?

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The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic affected global mobility. Governments used lockdowns and travel bans as control measures, and these actions also changed how buildings were used. This paper explores the roles of heritage sites in a post-COVID-19 pandemic society.

The research is part of the Urban Heritage and Community Resilience: Conservation, Tourism, and Pandemic project, which employs semistructured interviews, participant observations, archival research, and focus group discussions (FGDs). This paper is a qualitative study based on semistructured interviews with 118 participants across ten popular heritage sites in Banda Aceh and Aceh Besar, Indonesia.

The findings confirm a debated claim in postdisaster studies: some of these Acehnese heritage sites, especially those imbued with religious values, have become places of resilience. During the pandemic, these sites facilitated community resilience by helping people feel closer to God.

For practising Acehnese Muslims, prayer at home is culturally acceptable. However, praying at the mosque—one of the essential heritages of the Acehnese—contributed to and strengthened the sense of community resilience.

The paper concludes that visiting and participating in heritage sites, including experiencing a sense of place and carrying out religious and cultural activities, is integral to community resilience.