Caloian

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. The Caloian litany, which exists in various arrangements as a sample of primitive Romanian literature, usually refers to the figure being sent off to the skies to unlock rain, and buried so that it may be reborn. The figurine's mother is hinted at in such poems, and in some cases played by one of the girls attending the funeral procession.