Home · Legends & Customs · Deochi: the Evil Eye and What Puts It Out
A look that means no harm and does damage anyway. Deochi is not a curse but the side effect of admiration, which is why praising a child in the Carpathians came with a counter-word attached.
Deochi is de plus ochi — „from the eyes“. The word names no curse and no spell. It names what a look does, and it usually does it without meaning to. Whoever deochează wishes nobody ill; they simply look too long, admire too loudly, praise without setting the counter-word beside it.
That is where this belief gets uncomfortable. The dangerous person is not the enemy. It is the neighbour who says how well the child has turned out.
Newborns first, then women who had just given birth — both were held to be unfinished, porous, not quite back on this side yet. After them everything young and everything praised: calves, foals, the bride on her wedding day, the house that has only just been finished.
Animals showed it too. The records say bees that had been struck abandoned their hive and birds turned on each other.
Certain eyes fell under suspicion: blue ones in a region where most are brown; two eyes of different colour or shape; a squint; brows grown together. From Vâlcea it is recorded that people born with a caul were thought especially dangerous.
None of these marks implied ill will. You carried the danger in your face whether you wanted to or not.
A headache that arrives without warning. Yawning when nobody is tired — that is the clearest sign of all. Then ringing ears, nausea, weakness, sleeplessness; in small children fever and restlessness.
None of it is rare, and that is exactly what keeps the belief alive: there is hardly a day on which none of it happens.
The first defence was language. Anyone praising a child spat dryly three times and added the formula: ptiu, ptiu, să nu-l deochi — so that I do not deoche him. The praise was not withheld. It was defused.
Then came the red thread, ață roșie, tied around the child’s wrist or neck, along with garlic, a garment worn inside out, a charm. Red catches the look before it reaches the child — that is how it is explained.
Once the damage was done, only stinsul cărbunilor helped, the quenching of the embers. It required apă neîncepută, untouched water: drawn from spring, well or river, water nobody had drunk from yet.
Nine glowing embers went in one at a time, counted backwards from nine to one. The embers gave the diagnosis: if they sink, the person is deocheat; if they float, it was something else. Over them the descântătoare spoke her descântec, a formula sending the look back where it came from.
The patient then drank from the water, their temples were washed with it, and the rest went onto the roof of the house, embers and all. In Văleni in Prahova county three embers were enough; there the remaining water was given to the dog — if it shook itself, the look had been taken off.
The Orthodox Church rejected these practices, and said so plainly. John Chrysostom rebuked mothers who hung charms around their children’s necks and tied little bells to their wrists, and pointed them to the cross instead. Basil the Great went further and allowed that demons might make use of the eyes of the envious.
Neither ruled out the other. People prayed against the look and spat against it, often the same people on the same day.
In the Carpathian Chronicles the evil eye never stands on its own. It stands alongside the curse and the envious neighbour — and alongside prayer. The narrator of “The Village of the Hanged” notices it in the people who stand praying for three hours on Sunday and hand out memorial meals to the poor: the same people believe, with the same naturalness, in the evil eye, in curses, in the power of envious neighbours. To him superstition is not the opposite of piety but its shadow — and just as old.
That is why the words against the evil eye never contradicted the sign of the cross. Both grow from the same certainty: that the invisible world exists and governs the visible one. Whoever believes a candle helps the soul of a dead man needs no long lecture on how a glance can harm a child. In Corben Vale’s Carpathian Chronicles it is the same map — only one road leads upward and the other down.
The ember test has been described since the nineteenth century, among others by Simion Florea Marian (1879) and Grigore G. Tocilescu (1900); the regional variations, such as the three embers of Văleni, come from the same body of work. The list of who was at risk and whose eyes were feared, along with the position of the Church, follows Daniela Luminița Ivanovici, The belief in the existence of the „evil eye“ in the Romanian environment (Revista Teologică).
De and ochi — „from the eyes“. The word describes what a look does, not a curse that was spoken.
By the sudden headache and by yawning without being tired. Certainty came from the ember test: if the embers sink in the water, the look is taken as confirmed.
Red is meant to catch the look before it reaches the child, which is why it is worn where it shows: on the wrist, at the neck, on the clothes.
No, and that is the strange part. Admiration is enough. That is why praise came with the counter-word — saying both takes the force out of the look.
What villagers gave the dead so they would not return.
Why three in the morning was feared in the Carpathians.
The custom in a house of mourning, and what it prevents.
Corben Vale's Carpathian Chronicles tell exactly these kinds of stories – based on true events. “The Village of the Hanged” and “Stafii” are out in seven languages.
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