Baba Dochia

Also Known As: Romanian, “Old Woman Dochia”; also simply Dochia; called Baba Marta in Bessarabia and parts of Muntenia; the name comes from Saint Eudokia, Romanian Evdochia, whose feast falls on 1 March
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Romanian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Baba Dochia is the old woman whose temper is the weather of early March, the warm sun, rain, sleet and sudden frost of the first nine days of the month.
Role in Mythos: She is the old year in folk form, the impatient shepherdess who climbs to the mountain pastures too soon, dies of cold and is turned to stone with her flock.
Relation to Humans: Her days, from 1 to 9 March, open the farming year, and women choose one of them as their own day and read their fortune for the year from its weather. In the most common telling she is also a warning, the cruel mother-in-law every girl at the March gatherings hoped not to marry into.

On the first morning of March, a woman in a Romanian village picks a day. It has to be one of the next nine, and whatever weather arrives on it, sun or sleet or a wind that cuts through the shutters, will tell her how her year will go. Fair skies promise a good year and an easy old age. A day of hail promises something sharper. The day she has picked is her baba, her old woman, and the old woman behind the custom is Baba Dochia, who went up the mountain too early and never came down.

Dochia owns the first unsteady days of spring, the stretch when a warm noon can turn to hail by mid-afternoon and the snow on the high slopes cannot decide whether to stay. Her name came from the church calendar. The Orthodox Church keeps 1 March as the feast of Saint Eudokia, a convert of Heliopolis in the second century who gave away her fortune, entered a monastery and died a martyr. In Romanian the saint is Evdochia, and her name settled on the old woman whose days begin that same morning. In Bessarabia and parts of Muntenia people call her Baba Marta, Grandmother March, and do not bother with the saint at all.

The best-known telling makes her a mother-in-law, and not a kind one. Late in winter she sends her son’s young wife out to bring back ripe strawberries, an errand designed to fail. The girl searches the frozen hillsides and, with help from heaven, comes home with her hands full of red fruit. In some villages the help takes the shape of an old man who appears beside her in the snow. Dochia looks at the strawberries and draws exactly the wrong conclusion. Summer, she decides, has arrived. She gathers her flock and sets out for the high pastures.

Another version gives the son a name, Dragobete, and a marriage his mother did not approve. Dochia hands the bride a bundle of black wool and orders her to wash it white in the stream. The girl rinses it in water cold enough to numb her wrists, and the wool stays as black as it began. Then Christ appears on the bank and gives her a red flower, and the wool comes up clean. Dochia sees the flower, takes it for proof of spring, and the story walks on to the same mountain.

She climbs dressed for every possibility, in the heavy sheepskin coats called cojoace, nine of them in some villages and twelve in others, one for each month of the year. The weather does what March weather does. Rain sets in and soaks the fleeces until they drag at her shoulders, heavy and sour with wet wool, and she peels them off one at a time. In other tellings the sun comes out and she throws them off for the warmth. The animals keep moving up the slope ahead of her, bells knocking, breath steaming. On the ninth day, or the twelfth, the last coat comes off. Then the frost comes down, hard and clean, and freezes her where she stands with the whole flock around her. She was wrong about the weather, and it killed her.

What is left of her is still up there. People point to the stones on Ceahlău, on Caraiman in the Bucegi, and on Semenic in the west, and say that those grey shapes on the ridge are the old woman and her sheep. A third telling makes her not an old woman at all but the beautiful daughter of an emperor whose father had lost a war. The victor demanded her hand. She disguised herself in twelve sheepskins and fled up the mountain with her father’s sheep, shedding a coat each day as the air warmed, until a storm of rain and hail caught her with none left. Cornered, she raged at God, and she and her flock became stone.

That last version has a famous literary descendant, and a much younger one than it pretends. In the late 1830s the Moldavian writer Gheorghe Asachi published a poem, Dochia și Traian, printed with the date 1840 and billed as following “the sayings of the Romanian people.” In it Dochia is the daughter of Decebalus, last king of the Dacians, pursued by the conquering emperor Trajan. She calls on the Dacian god Zalmoxis and is turned into a rock that weeps rain and thunder over Ceahlău. The poem gave a young nation a story about Dacian resistance to Rome, and modern retellings now hang it on the rock formations called Babele in the Bucegi. It is Asachi’s. The Spanish scholar Mariano Martín Rodríguez calls it a neo-legend, and notes that the village tales it drew on are thoroughly Christian, with no real trace of pre-Roman religion in them. In the folk stories God, Christ and a saint’s day run the plot. Zalmoxis arrives only with the poet.

The village calendar kept her days with care. The first nine days of March were the days of the old woman, and on 9 March, the feast of the Forty Martyrs, they gave way to the days of the old men, the Moșii, who were supposed to bring the warmth and end the winter for good. A proverb counts her stretch at twelve days instead and promises spring once they are past. The first of March opened the farming year. Orchards and yards were cleaned, beehives tended, and by the ninth the seed was going into the ground. Women met to spin wool together and sow beans, and wore the mărțișor, a twisted cord of red and white, which they tied to a flowering branch when the month was done. The hopes attached to all this were practical: good crops, no sickness, and for the unmarried girls, a husband whose mother was nothing like Dochia.

Her power is the sky of those nine days. Every change of weather in early March is her shaking off another coat or losing her temper on the ridge, and the woman who picked a day has staked a year on her mood. Ethnographers read her death on 9 March as the old year dying so the new one can begin, the barren season giving way to the fertile one, and the calendar treats it as both an ending and a turn. Her weakness is the same thing that made her a story. She is impatient. She reads one sign, a handful of strawberries or a single red flower, and believes it against the evidence of the snow still lying on the mountain. She strips off her protection because the sun came out for an afternoon. And every year, on the ninth day, the frost proves her wrong again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Baba Dochia in Romanian folklore?

Baba Dochia is the old woman of early spring in Romanian folk tradition, blamed for the changeable weather of the first days of March. In the best-known story she is a cruel mother-in-law who thinks spring has come too early, drives her flock up the mountain in a stack of sheepskin coats, sheds them as the weather changes, and freezes to stone with her animals.

Why does Baba Dochia wear nine or twelve sheepskin coats?

The coats, called cojoace, are what she climbs the mountain in, and she takes them off one by one as rain soaks them or the sun warms her. The number varies by village: nine coats match the nine days of the old woman from 1 to 9 March, and twelve coats are said to stand for the twelve months. When the last coat comes off, the frost comes down and Baba Dochia dies of cold.

What are the days of Baba Dochia?

The days of Baba Dochia are the first nine days of March, ending on 9 March, the feast of the Forty Martyrs, when the days of the old men, the Moșii, begin. Women traditionally choose one of those nine days as their own, and its weather is read as a sign of how their year will go. Fair weather promises a good year, and a stormy day promises a hard one.

Is the story of Dochia and Trajan an ancient Dacian legend?

No. The version in which Dochia is the daughter of the Dacian king Decebalus, fleeing the emperor Trajan and turned to stone by Zalmoxis, comes from Gheorghe Asachi’s poem Dochia și Traian, printed with the date 1840. The scholar Mariano Martín Rodríguez calls it a neo-legend and notes that the village tales of Baba Dochia it drew on are Christian, with no real trace of pre-Roman religion.

How is Baba Dochia connected to Saint Eudokia and the mărțișor?

Baba Dochia takes her name from Saint Eudokia, called Evdochia in Romanian, whose feast the Orthodox Church keeps on 1 March, the day Dochia’s days begin. The same morning opens the season of the mărțișor, the red and white cord worn in early March and later tied to a flowering branch. In one version of the Baba Dochia story, the red flower Christ gives her daughter-in-law is the sign of spring that sends Dochia up the mountain.