Caloian

The tradition & historical record

Caloian (also Calian(i), Caloiță, Scaloian, Gherman, or Iene) was a rainmaking and fertility rite in Romania, similar in some ways to Dodola. Its namesake is a clay effigy, whose sculpting, funeral, exhumation, and eventual destruction are centerpieces of the display. The source of this ritual, as is the case with those of many other local popular beliefs and practices, precedes the introduction of Christianity, although it came in time to be associated with Orthodox Easter or with the Feast of the Ascension. In some variants it was performed on a precisely calculated day two to three weeks after Easter, though local communities could also revive it at other times of the year, specifically during drought. The figurine was generally made from clay and most often by girls, though sometimes also by boys or married women; the ceremony itself would draw in the whole village community as spectators, and, in isolated cases, also had active participation from the Romanian Orthodox clergy. The mimicry of Christian funerals was widespread, but absent from the more established forms of the ritual. Before dying out in the 1990s, the Caloian tradition had possibly survived for millennia, and may have originated with Dacian strands of Paleo-Balkan mythology. It evoked memories of human sacrifice for the appeasement of rain deities, with parallel near-sacrifices of girls being still attested in rural Romania during the first half of the 20th century. ¹

Caloian had a spring version, which often occurred on the "third Tuesday after Easter", and concluded on the following Thursday. Folklorists Ion H. Ciubotaru an Silvia Ciubotaru write that having fixed days for Caloian during Easter was "wholly exceptional" in a Moldavian context; they also indicate one other variant in which Caloian coincided with the first Thursday after Easter. As noted by ethnologist Anca Ceaușescu, this variant was specifically a fertility rite, which was mostly tied to spring and renewal, rather than to the celebration of Easter itself. She records instances where Caloian was performed on the sixth week after Easter, on Thomas Sunday, or "always around May 8". Children up to the age of 12 were preferred for performing the ritual, owing to their "ritual purity", and in some cases only selected to fit into an odd number. Performers are most often described as young girls, and sometimes boys, though folklorist Teodor Burada, who speaks from a Western Moldavian perspective, also records the occasional involvement of married women. According to Ciubotaru and Ciubotaru, a situation idealized in the more traditional forms of the Caloian was that in which the people involved were girls around the age of nine, or adolescent virgins, who were either sisters or first cousins. Men remained strictly prohibited for most of Caloian's history. Depending on the communities involved, the Caloian was regarded as an infant, a grown child, or an adult. His effigy was put together from fresh yellow clay, and sometimes also mud, old rags, or wax. The latter two variants are described by the Ciubotarius as modern improvisations. ¹

The Caloian was also revived in rainmaking rituals that could take place later in the year, specifically "on days that follow several dry weeks, when it's sultry and the earth gets scorched by drought"; ethnologist Mihaela Bucin argues that, even as a spring ritual, the Caloian was implicitly associated with rainmaking. Progressively, the celebration was reduced in scope to a rain ritual, by confusion with other festivals, and sometimes to stop heavy rainfall as well. Ethnographer Ion Ghinoiu also proposes that the exhumation and destruction portion of some rituals may have originated with people angered by the continuation of drought: "Perhaps at an earlier stage the Caloian was only exhumed on the third day only if no rain had followed its burial. These two rites were then contracted as one, and the latter became a mere sequence of the former." Contrarily, the Ciubotarus propose that breaking up the effigy was done to prevent excessive rain, and also that it represented an attenuated human sacrifice. They refer to first-hand accounts from the early 20th century which described adolescent girls, dressed up in funeral attire, being hurled into Moldavian rivers by other youth, and barely surviving the experience. A transition between the human version and the Caloian is attested in Lișna, where young villagers created human-sized dolls, or zâne, which they pretended were real girls that have to be kidnapped and buried in order to end droughts. One informant suggested in 1949 that Caloian (known to her as Iene) was only ever performed in times of drought, usually on weekends, and with no day of rest in-between (though "sometimes, preparation are made throughout the week ahead"). ¹

The Caloian is one of several burial ceremonies present in Romanian folklore—Pop draws parallels with the chasing out of the Brezaia doll at Christmas and New Years', or with the symbolic burial of a ceremonial leader at Junii Brașoveni feasts. As "one of the most archaic elements covered by the folk Calendar", Caloian itself may be deeply connected to the mythological lore of ancient cultures. Istoria literaturii romîne described Caloian as one of several songs or chants which serve to "mirror forms of [social] life that lead us back to the patriarchal village as it was at the dawn of the feudal era", and more particularly "descriptions of ceremonials or rites." Further: "the Caloian was, at least up to a point, the reification of an old concept regarding the Oriental god of nature, who dies and is resurrected." As early as 1883, pioneer ethnologist Gheorghe Săulescu discussed similarities between Caloian and Dodola, whom he respectively knew as Calian and Papaluga. In Săulescu's reading, both were originally "national gods" of the Romanians. This approach linked Calioan with interest in Paleo-Balkan mythology. More specifically, Burada proposed that Caloian originated with the pre-Christian Dacians in Northern Dobruja (Scythia Minor). Drăgoescu argues for the same reading, reviewing the practice as "pre-Christian, agrarian", and ultimately a remnant of Dacian material culture. Contrarily, other scholars place the Caloian's roots in Roman Dacia, with imitations of the Argei cult. Beginning with the writings of Marcu Beza, researchers have focused on the death-and-rebirth component of the practice, drawing connections between the Caloian and various religions of the Ancient Near East—with specific focus on Dumuzid and Attis. ¹

Săulescu was the first to record the Caloian as he witnessed it in Western Moldavia. In 1915, Burada was aware of it existing only in "certain villages" of Muntenia—split between Brăila, Buzău and Ialomița counties—and in only one locality of Western Moldavia—namely Hermeziu, Iași County. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Caloian”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Caloian is rainmaking and fertility rite in Romania, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²