There are few places left in the world that remain truly remote. It seems like man has explored and inhabited every corner of the globe, from the tallest heights to the deepest depths. But the Russian taiga, stretching across Siberia remains one of the few truly wild expanses in the world. Five million square miles, the region stretches from the Russian arctic as south as Mongolia, and from the Urals all the way to the Pacific. The region is so vast and remote that few people have ever explored any significant portion of it, and it remains largely pristine and untouched to this day.
It is also however a vast source of oil and mineral wealth for Russia, and in 1978 a helicopter surveying the region made a startling discovery. The helicopter's mission was to find a safe place to land a party of geologists sent to explore the region. The men were to survey the landscape and determine the best location to prospect for oil and minerals, and rather than trek through the thick woods and tall mountains on foot, relied on the helicopter to leap between prospective sites.
On the hunt for a new site to set the team down, the helicopter had followed the course of the Abakan river and turned to follow one of its tributaries, but was having zero luck finding a clearing to land on- the thick pine trees pressed in so close together that there was no room for a safe landing. As the chopper pulled up along a narrow valley with steep walls, the pilot suddenly spotted something decidedly unnatural, and that should not exist.
A small clearing with several deep furrows lie six thousand feet up a mountain side, and the helicopter made several passes so that the crew could determine that they had truly discovered what they believed the clearing to be- a garden for growing crops. Flying back to base the pilots reported to the geologists what they had discovered. The news astounded and worried the team, as they were over one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest city, and this entire region was unexplored.
There was not supposed to be anybody out here, and as one of the geologists later put it, the idea of running into strangers in the wilderness was more dangerous to them than running into a bear or other wild animal. Nonetheless, the team decided to investigate the site, and gathering up gifts of goodwill offerings in their backpacks, prepared to hike to the spot found by the helicopter pilots. Despite their hopes that a meeting with these strangers would go well, many of the geologists carried loaded pistols just in case...
The team soon set off for the garden site, and still a few miles away started to find evidence of human habitation. Someone had felled a large log and rolled it so it formed a bridge over a stream, and had even hewn a rough path through the woods. Along that path the geologists stumbled into a shed, inside of which were containers made of birch bark and stuffed with cut-up dried potatoes- this discovery confirmed that the pilots had indeed spotted a garden on the mountain after all.
Just a little bit past the shed though, the team of geologists made another astonishing discovery. A small hut, piled up on all sides with all matter of tree bark, branches, and even planks, sat by the edge of the small stream. It had clearly been there a long time as the wood had blackened with age. At first the geologists assumed it was merely another storage hut, but then they spotted a small, square window- the hut's only source of illumination.
Then, with a slow creak and a groan, a small door opened up. An old man slowly stepped out of the hut, cautiously inspecting the team of geologists. He was barefoot and wearing a shirt made out of sacks that had been repeatedly repatched over the years. His pants were also made out of sack cloth, and his wild, unruly hair was a mess that matched his equally unkempt beard. The old man seemed terrified of the team and unsure of what to make of the situation, and to break the tension, one of the geologists shouted, “Greetings, grandfather! We've come to visit!” The old man hesitated, but then quietly responded with, “Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.”
Hesitantly, the geologists entered the small hut, stooping to enter through the low door. Inside the floor was bare dirt covered up with potato peels and pine-nut shells, and sagging, rotting wooden logs kept the ceiling from collapsing downwards. It resembled less a house, or even a shack, and more a warren such as that made by muskrats or beavers to hole up for the winter. A single small fire burned inside with one hole in the ceiling to vent the smoke. The one tiny window was the only source of illumination, and the light that came in fell on a family of five.
The man shared the hut with two sons and two daughters, with the daughters clearly terrified of the visitors. One of the daughters hid behind a log and cried, praying out loud, “This is for our sins, our sins.” The geologists realized they were terrifying the family and decided to quickly back out of the hut. The men set up to eat lunch a few yards away from the camp, and after half an hour the cabin door creaked open and the old man and his daughters moved to join the geologists. The man spoke good Russian and was understandable, but the sisters spoke a distorted version of the language to each other.
Clearly they had never before encountered other people, and their lifelong isolation had severely affected their speech. The geologists offered the family some of their food- jam, tea, and bread- but the daughters gasped, “we are not allowed that!”. Astonished, the scientists asked the father if they had ever eaten bread, to which he replied that he had, but his daughters had never seen it before. The team decided to leave the family alone, though not without giving them some supplies as a gift.
Over the next few years the geologists continued to visit the family and learn more about them. The father was called Karp Lykov, and he had once been a regular member of Russian society. He was a member of the Old Believers, a fundamentalists Russian Orthodox sect, and a frequent target of the Russian government's persecution. During Peter the Great's reign, he had persecuted the Old Believers and other fundamentalists, and in a bid to modernize Russia he taxed the wearing of long beards, believing them to be a symbol of antiquated beliefs.
If one was unable to pay the tax, they would have their beard forcibly shaved off. Then after the Russian revolution that overthrew the Czars, the Bolsheviks took power. As atheists they had cracked down on religious communities even harder than the Czars ever had, and many religious communities fled to Siberia to escape persecution. In great purges Bolshevik troops would burn down religious buildings and sometimes even imprison or outright kill faith practitioners. In 1936, Lykov and his brother had been working on the outskirts of their village when a communist patrol shot at them. Lykov's brother was immediately killed, and Lykov immediately gathered his family and fled to the wilderness.
Two of the children had never before seen another human being, and though they knew that there were such things as cities and even other countries full of people, these were nothing more than abstract ideas to the children. Their education had consisted of reading and writing lessons carried out with the help of an ancient family bible along with a few other religious texts. When shown a photo of a horse, one of the daughters recognized it from Bible stories, but she had never seen the animal in person, let alone a photograph. The family had been gradually moving deeper and deeper into the wilderness for years, terrified of communist persecution. Finally they had settled in the spot they were discovered at a whopping one hundred and fifty miles from the nearest city. Getting there even with the help of a boat was hard work, yet the family had learned to live in isolation.
They faced many hardships though, and most of their clothes were made out of hemp cloth, their original clothing items having worn away to nothing over the decades. For food the family foraged for what it could in the summertime, but since they had no way of repairing kettles that had rusted away with time, they were unable to cook most of their food. This meant that they lived primarily on a diet of potato patties mixed with ground up rye and hemp seeds. The wilderness around them however offered plenty of pine nuts and berries during the short spring and summer though, and the three men hunted by trapping animals when they could.
The youngest son, Dmitry, had become a prodigal hunter, resorting back to the ancient techniques that made humans so successful in the ancient Savannah from which we came from. Without a gun or even a bow, he would simply run an animal until it became exhausted, chasing it for miles over the rough mountain terrain. He was recorded as having an incredible endurance, capable of running for miles and miles even barefoot in the middle of winter, and sleeping out in the open during winter days as he hunted his prey. Unfortunately tragedy struck in 1961, when snow fell in early June. Already living close to starvation, the frost killed the few crops growing in their garden and the family was reduced to eating tree bark and their tree-bark galoshes and shoes.
Not wishing to see her children go hungry, the mother, Akulina, gave up what little food she had for her children and died of starvation that summer. In their garden though a tiny miracle which would save their lives took place, with a single grain of rye sprouting from the devastated crops. The family built a small fence around it and guarded it day and night for weeks, keeping squirrels and mice away. From the 18 grains the single growth of rye yielded, they rebuilt their entire rye crop.
The family slowly got to know about the outside world thanks to the visiting geologists. They had no idea that World War II had taken place, and Lykov absolutely refused to believe that man had actually set foot on the moon, but he was not surprised to learn of the invention of satellites. Ever since the 1950s he and his family had watched as new, strange stars rapidly zipped by overhead, and Lykov had noted to his family that “People have thought something up and are sending out fires that are very like stars.” What truly impressed and delighted Lykov the most though was cellophane, who exclaimed that it was like glass but crumpled up in your hand.
The youngest daughter, Agafia, and youngest son, Dmitry, quickly grew friendly and much closer with the geologists than the rest of the family. The decades of isolation had crafted Agafia's speech into a sing-song pattern, and this at first made the scientists believe that she was dim-witted. In reality, Agafia was quite intelligent and clever, and was often sarcastic and able to poke fun at herself and her situation. Dmitry gladly led the geologists around the woods he knew so closely, and was the first of the family to accept their invitation to visit their own camp down the stream.
There he marveled at all the new technology, having seen nearly zero technology before over his entire lifetime. Soon the family was accepting the geologists for longer and longer stretches at a time, and one of the men, an oil driller named Yerofei Sedov, even developed a close bond with the hermit family. He would spend days at a time helping the family plant and harvest crops or undertake new construction and maintenance projects.
Though at first the family had only accepted a single gift from their visitors- salt, which Lykov claimed had been a torture to live without- soon they were accepting clothes, knives, forks, grain and flashlights. Eventually they even began visiting the geologists camp together, and there they discovered television, which enraptured them- even as it terrified them. Often the family members would pray for forgiveness after watching the television, believing it to have been a sin. Sadly though, the family would go into rapid decline soon after reestablishing contact with the outside world.
Thanks to their harsh diet, two of the children, the eldest son and daughter, both died of kidney failure just a few years after the geologist's first visit. Dmitry, the geologist's closest friend in the family, also died of pneumonia, likely brought on by infection through one of the visitors. With no previous contact with the outside world and its germs, his body was unable to fight off the infection. The distraught geologists pleaded with the family to allow them to call for a helicopter and have Dmitry flown to a hospital, but he himself refused. His final words were a whisper, “We are not allowed that. A man lives for howsoever God grants.”
By 1981 three of the family members were dead, and on February 16th 1988, twenty seven years to the day when his wife died of starvation, the father died as well. With the help of the geologists, Agafia, the youngest daughter, buried her father. The scientists had long ago discovered family members who had survived the purges and were living in their original villages, and offered to have Agafia reunited with them, but she refused their offer. Agafia remained on the mountain she had known all her life. Today she is well into her seventies and still lives on that mountainside, though none have visited for years and it's likely that she has finally joined her family.
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