The domovoi is the household spirit of Slavic folk belief, most often pictured as a small old man with a long grey beard, sometimes entirely covered in hair, who lives behind the stove, beneath the threshold or in an outbuilding and watches over the family that shelters him. Belief in the domovoi is documented across Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Polish folk tradition, recorded chiefly in nineteenth and early twentieth century ethnographic collections rather than in any surviving pre-Christian text, since Slavic paganism left no native scripture of its own.
A domovoi's temperament depended on how the household treated him. A family that left him a bowl of milk or porridge, kept the house orderly and spoke of him respectfully could expect a helpful, even affectionate presence, one that might groom the horses in the night or warn of coming trouble by moaning behind the stove or tangling a sleeper's hair as an omen. A domovoi that felt neglected or disrespected turned mischievous or spiteful, hiding tools, breaking dishes and making the household's animals restless.
Moving house required special care. A family was expected to formally invite its domovoi along, sometimes by carrying embers from the old stove to the new one, since a domovoi abandoned in an empty house was thought to grieve or grow dangerous to whoever moved in next. The custom persisted in folk practice well after Christianity had displaced the wider pantheon of Slavic gods from active worship, one of the longest-lived fragments of the older religion.