Sit Down Before You Leave, or the Road Will Go Wrong

The bags are in the hall. The taxi is two minutes away. Someone already has a hand on the door. Then the sentence comes, half joke, half order: Присядем на дорожку. Everyone sits. For a few seconds, or a minute, the room is quiet. Jennifer Monaghan, in the Moscow Times, describes the rule as applying to all members of the group, including those who are staying. It need not last long. It is supposed to make the trip safe. It is also, she adds, a last chance to notice what you forgot. Wikipedia’s compilation of Russian superstitions records a variant: sit on or beside the suitcase. Returning for a forgotten object, once you have left, is a separate bad omen. The sitting is meant to catch the object before the omen does.

Vasnetsov’s knight has stopped before a stone that offers roads. The painting is a bylina image, not a family hallway. It still names the feeling. Departure, in this culture, is not a clean Western dash for the train. It is a pause in which the house and the road look at each other. Popular explanations, in travel pages, reach for home spirits: a moment of tribute before you leave their care. That is folklore speaking in a modern kitchen. Ivanits’s map of the ‘unclean force’ put danger at thresholds and crossroads; a silent sit before the journey is the domestic answer to both. You do not have to buy the spirit. You can buy the minute. People who mock the custom still sit, because not sitting would be the more conspicuous act.

Kustodiev’s Merchant Wife and the Domovoi, 1922, is that spirit as a painted fact in a room: a stove, a bed, a shaggy house-being with a lantern. The sit before a journey is a smaller courtesy to the same idea — that the house has an owner besides the people packing bags.

What the silence is for

Monaghan’s practical clause is the one families will admit: have you got the tickets, the charger, the keys, the child’s hat. The superstition does the work of a checklist while pretending to be older than checklists. Bridge to Moscow, a local guide, calls the pause a tribute to home spirits and then, in the next breath, notes that you may remember the forgotten thing. Both sentences can be true in one hallway. The Levada figure Monaghan cites — 52 percent believing in omens in 2013 — is not a census of who sits. Sitting is cheaper than belief. It is also kinder than a shouted inventory. For a few seconds nobody is late. Then everybody is late together, which is a Russian punctuality of its own.

Before embarking on any journey, superstition dictates that all members of the group should sit down in silence — even if not everyone is traveling. This doesn’t have to be for a long time, but will ensure that the trip is a safe one. It’s also a good opportunity to make sure you have everything you need for the journey.

The journey need not be Siberia. A weekend at the dacha will do. A flight will do. Seeing someone to the elektrichka will do. The people who remain on the chairs are part of the rite; they are not an audience. If you are the foreigner, you sit. You do not keep standing with your coat as if the play did not include you. You do not fill the silence with a joke unless someone else does first. The joke, when it comes, is usually the custom naming itself: well, we have sat, now we can go. The naming does not cancel the sit. It is how a living superstition survives among people who went to school.

Vasnetsov’s other winter picture, Moving House, is the sit after it has failed or finished: a sledge, a life piled up, the road already under the runners. Most departures are smaller. A backpack. A jar of something for the hosts. The threshold article on this site is about not shaking hands in the frame you are about to use. This article is about not using it yet. First the chairs. Then the shoes. Then the door. Then, if you have forgotten the charger, you live with the omen or you break it, which many people also do, with a knock on wood and a face that says they know they are being silly.

How to hold the minute

When you hear присядем, sit. Put the bag down. Do not open the door. If you are seeing someone off, sit with them. When someone stands, the rest may stand. There is no priest. There is no stopwatch. The knight on Vasnetsov’s canvas had a stone with writing on it. You have a stool in a hall that smells of outdoor air and frying. Both are a way of not rushing the first step. The road, in a country that has always been long, is allowed to wait for a breath.