“Thunder” Holidays in the Summer and Autumn Calendar Cycle of Ukrainians of the Carpathians

Author

Kolomyichuk Oleksandr

a Ph.D. in History, a research fellow at the Ukrainian Ethnological Centre Department of M. Rylskyi Institute of Art Studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine).

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2865-2396

“Thunder” Holidays in the Summer and Autumn Calendar Cycle of Ukrainians of the Carpathians

Abstract

The article is based on the materials of field expeditionary research, ethnographic sources from the second half of the 19th – early-21st centuries, and works by contemporary Ukrainian ethnologists. The features of “thunder” holidays in the summer-autumn calendar cycle of the Ukrainians of the Carpathians are considered. It is defined, that “thunder” days play an important role in the calendar and ritual practice of ethnographic groups of the Ukrainian Carpathians. This is a period when traditional male and female occupations were socially prohibited – in particular, working in the garden and in the field, construction and repair activities, weaving, and bleaching of linen. Restrictions were also often imposed on grazing livestock. Failure to observe customary communal norms could, as a consequence of adverse atmospheric phenomena, provoke the ignition of residential or farm buildings, the loss of harvested crops or the burning of haystacks; moreover, the violator of such a folk injunction might even face death. It is emphasized that such consequences of neglecting traditional warnings are of an individual nature.

It is considered that during the summer period, the Ukrainians of the Carpathians paid special attention to the observance of the “Ninth Thursday” and the “Tenth Friday” after Easter, treating any economic activity during these days with particular caution. The focus of folk tradition in the Carpathians is centered on a series of “thunder” holidays, during which any agricultural work is considered taboo, at the turn of the summer and autumn seasons. The inhabitants of Boikivshchyna, Lemkivshchyna, and Hutsulshchyna, as throughout Ukraine, held St. Elijah and St. Panteleimon in great reverence and therefore strictly refrained from fieldwork on the days dedicated to these saints. It is noted that in some regions of Ukraine, the “thunder” holidays during the harvest period were feared even until the mid-20th century. In Boikivshchyna, as late as the 1970s, transporting hay home during this period was still considered dangerous.

Peculiar attention is paid in the article to the means of preventing and averting natural disasters, those are manifested, in particular, in ritual processions around the fields, one-day fasts, and the use of candles blessed on Candlemas and at Easter as effective apotropaic means.

Keywords

“thunder” holidays, thunder, folk calendar, prohibition, work, the Carpathians.

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