About

Hi! My name is Marcin, and I’m from Poland. Things that interests me are music, painting and wood carving.

I’ve started the blog to document my journey with wood carving but with time painting hooked me as well, so you can expect to see here posts from both worlds. From time to time, I write guides when I learn something new.

What “Śreżoga” is?

As for me and the choice of word, I was looking for something related to the Slavs to fit the topic of the site and came across a word meaning light effect. Common, yet for me, having a bit of mysticism in it. Interestingly, this word does not just mean rays of light in a forest thicket piercing through the branches of trees, as you can read about below.

Do you know what Śrzeżoga is? No? Don’t worry, you’re not the only ones. Śrzeżoga is an old, almost forgotten word that refers to a rather obscure natural phenomenon. Over the course of history, this term has also been written as Sreżoga, Srzeżoga, Śrzeżoga, and Strzeżoga. Originally, it simply meant ‘the wilting or withering of flowers or leaves due to the cold’ (as noted by Lind, and similarly by Doroszewski about a century and a half later). In this sense, it was often contrasted with life-giving dew in songs and psalms: “Ye dews and Śrzeżogas bless the Lord.” In nature, the wilting of leaves and flowers can be observed in the autumn or at the threshold of winter, during frosty, sunny mornings when a light mist rises over meadows and gardens, and the sunlight filters through the bare branches of trees, refracting off the mist droplets and creating “divine fingers” – radiant beams warming the frozen earth. This is why, in early dictionaries, the definition of Śrzeżoga is accompanied by interesting examples of use that don’t fit the definition but reveal another meaning of the word: “Śrzeżoga seems to be smoke from blue paint, spread out and hanging in the air.” From this, in some dictionaries, Śrzeżoga is defined as ‘a sunbeam reflection that occurs on clear days when sunlight breaks through a layer of mist or smoke’. The “mistiness” of Śrzeżoga led to a shift in its meaning, and it came to also refer to another phenomenon: ‘a light mist on a hot day, the shimmering of heated air’ – this usage of Śrzeżoga is found in Doroszewski’s dictionary.

Source: www.nck.pl