Say a little prayer: saints, Slavic gods, and a successful fieldwork season

Last October, I was lucky enough to go to the Czech Republic to undertake fieldwork for my thesis. The fieldwork involved gathering drone surveys of agricultural fields and seeing whether they had been damaged by wild boar, who like to dig around in the grass for food during the colder months. I had never flown a drone before, and at the beginning I was excited, but also a smidge nervous: what if I accidentally crashed a 1500-euro piece of university-owned equipment?

Flying the drone turned out to be the easy part- what gave my supervisor and me headaches were the weather conditions. Our drones were not waterproof, and they were relatively lightweight: therefore, they could be only flown in dry, clear, and calm conditions. October is not the month you would typically associate with this kind of weather, and our first week in the field was indeed plagued by showers, fog, and strong gusts. Not ideal when you have a target to drone a minimum of 60 fields in the space of four weeks.

As the rain continued to pour down that week, my supervisor voiced a fear: what if we weren’t able to get enough sites? Would we be able to stay longer, would the funds stretch? I suggested, half-jokingly, that we could say a prayer to a deity of some kind: it couldn’t hurt to try, right? 

That evening in our log cabin we browsed Wikipedia and did a deep dive on Christian patron saints, with the reasoning that there must be at least one who could possibly help us. Eventually, we had a list, which included the patron saints of the weather (St. Medard), and of drivers (St. Frances- we really needed her help while traversing some of the rural Czech roads). We also included a local pagan god, Radegast, for good measure, as he was a Slavic god of the sun and abundance. 

List made, we built a fire in the wood stove of our cabin and grabbed a bottle of half-drunk wine from the kitchen. Sprinkling a few drops onto the flames, we said our “prayers” to the saints and Radegast and asked them to accept our meagre offering in return. The wine hissed dramatically on the embers, but no divine intervention occurred- or at least, we thought it hadn’t. 

Weeks passed, and we didn’t think much about our ritual until the end of the month, when we sat counting our final number of drone sites. 99. We had completed 99 sites. The weather had been so favourable that we had been able to significantly overshoot our target. My supervisor was over the moon and shouted jubilantly to the sky: “Thank you, Medard!”. 

I wouldn’t consider myself a very superstitious person, but I have a newfound respect for patron saints and pagan gods. In fact, I think they deserve to be mentioned in the acknowledgement section of my thesis. But who knows, maybe they’d prefer a few drops of red wine instead.