DOROTA THROWS THE SLED INTO THE FENCE
ACCURACY OF WEATHER LORES IN SLOVAKIA IN THE YEARS 2000-2024
booklet
2025
Weather lores (pranostiky) are established verbal statements mostly tied to predicting weather patterns during different times of the year. They were created based on the observation of nature and recurring natural phenomena. In the past, they were especially important for weather forecasting, planning agricultural work or predicting the harvest, even though some of them seem to describe something very unclear and abstract, for example, whether the year will be good, bad, nice or happy. Weather lores usually take the form of short-versed texts, which makes them easy to remember and they are almost always associated either with the names of saints or nameday celebrations, resulting in statements that appear to attribute specific natural phenomena to a specific person.
Even though weather lores no longer serve a practical function, they remain part of a shared language and knowledge passed down through generations. In this publication, I researched the accuracy of weather lores over the past 25 years by:
— comparing the weather predictions of weather lores with real meteorological data from the last 25 years in my hometown, Košice, Slovakia
— interviewing 13 people from Košice to explore their subjective experiences and memories
