After the Chernobyl accident of 1986 the expeditions to Polesye that since the 1960s were organized by the Institute of Slavic Studies and led by N.I. Tolstoy, were continued by the fieldstudies in the Ukrainian Carpathians and later by the researches on Russian idiomas of Central Russian Upland started in 1994. Whereas the expeditions were linguistic ones and focused primarely on dialectological and comparative issues, the participants practiced tape recording texts applying to the ethnolinguistic questionaries, originaly created for the expeditions in Polesye. Loads of narratives refer to the traditions, customs and beliefs of the local inhabitants and therefore perfectly complement the materials from the Polesyian and Carpathian archives. The paper presents some notes on archaic customs and beliefs of Central Russian Upland.