Baba Dochia

Baba Dochia or Dochia ("Dochia") in the mythology of Romania, is a name from the Byzantine calendar, which celebrated the martyr Evdokia on March 1. The Romanian Dochia personifies the impatience of humanity with the arrival of spring. Myth

Baba Dochia has a son, named Dragomir or Dragobete, who is married. Towards the end of February Dochia sends her daughter-in-law to pick berries from the forest. God appears to the girl in the form of an old man and helps her. When Dochia sees the berries, she thinks that spring has arrived, and leaves for the mountains with her son and her goats. She is dressed in twelve sheepskins, but there is rain on the mountain, and her clothes become damp and heavy. Dochia has to give up the leathers and, when the frost comes, she dies of cold along with her goats. His son also died of cold with a piece of ice in his mouth because he was playing the flute.

Dochia is sometimes portrayed as a superb woman, who provokes the month of March and who performs her revenge taking some days of the month of February.

According to other sources, Dochia was the daughter of Decebalus, king of the Dacians. While the Roman emperor Trajan was conquering part of the Dacia, Dochia sought refuge in the Carpathians so as not to have to marry him. She dressed as a shepherdess, but in the end she took off her lambskin clothes and died of coldness along with her flock. It was then transformed into a stream and its animals into flowers. A variant, Traian şi Dochia, on which literary critic George Călinescu remarked that it was "the result of a whole Romanian people's life experience," relates that Dochia hid in the sacred mountain, Ceahlău, together with her flock of sheep . There she was helped by the Virgin, who transformed her with her flock into a group of rocks.

The days of Baba Dochia are March 1 (for snow), March 2 (for summer), and March 3 (for harvest).

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