Ailment Ends Russian Hermit's 70 Year Exile

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Ailment Ends Russian Hermit's 70 Year Exile   

A famous Russian hermit was finally forced to end her 70 year exile from society after authorities brought her to a hospital to treat leg pains.

The last remnant of a strict religious sect, Agafia Lykova was raised in the wilds of Siberia by her family who had abandoned civilization in 1936.

Their incredible story became known when Russian geologists found them in 1978.

Siberian hermit airlifted to hospital over leg pain
Agafia Lykova, 70, who has spent her whole life in the Russian wilderness, called in help using satellite phone

Agafia Lykova is the last remaining member of a deeply religious family that fled civilisation in 1936 and did not know about the second world war until geologists stumbled upon them in 1978. After she contacted the “mainland” with an emergency satellite telephone to ask for medical help, the governor, Aman Tuleyev, ordered her evacuation from her homestead near the Abakan river to a hospital in Tashtagol, according to the Kemerovo region website.

Doctors have “removed the acute pain” in her legs and plan to keep her in hospital over the next week, it said. Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported that the pain was related to cartilage deterioration.

A member of the Old Believer sect that split off from the Russian Orthodox church 350 years ago, Lykova’s father, Karp, took his wife and two children into the taiga after a Soviet patrol shot his brother, eventually settling more than 150 miles (240km) from the nearest village. The family survived for decades on their remote homestead, where winter temperatures reach -40C, without guns, salt or metal implements.

The youngest of four children, Agafia had not encountered any human beings outside her family, had read only the Bible and prayer books, and had never tasted bread or milk before she was 35. Outdated words and religious terms pepper her speech. She has lived alone since her father died in 1988, although bears and foxes sometimes disturb her looking for food.

Last year, the British director Rebecca Marshall began work on a documentary about Lykova, called The Forest in Me.

“When I finally met Agafia, what surprised me was that rather than feeling like a primitive situation, it felt like arriving in the future – to a world with no technology, the vast forest littered with discarded space junk,” Marshall told Russia Beyond the Headlines, referring to the fact that Lykova’s home is under the flight path of rockets from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. “It is an incredible and beautiful place.”

The remarkable meeting saw Agafia introduced to the first people she had ever met that were not from her family and tasting milk as well as bread for the first time.

Despite the newfound connection to civilization and learning how the world had changed since their self-imposed disappearance, the Lykovas chose not to rejoin society.

Ultimately, Agafia outlived the other members of her family and enjoyed a solitary existence since 1988.

That somewhat changed last year when she agreed to be filmed for a documentary about her life in exile.

However she finally left her homestead after seven decades when a recent bout with leg pains forced Agafia to call for medical help and she was subsequently evacuated to receive treatment.

Said to be recovering well, she is expected to remain hospitalized for another week before presumably being allowed to return to the wildness from whence she came.

Source: The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/15/siberian-hermit-agafia-lykova-russia-airlifted-to-hospital-over-leg-pain