Lessons from a Hermit

Living alone, deep in the Sayan Mountains, Agafya Lykova is a window onto Russia’s past.

It isn’t often that Agafya Lykova receives visitors.

The handful of wooden huts and outbuildings that she calls home are 2,500 meters above sea level in Russia’s Sayan Mountains, nestled in a hanging valley between four precipitous peaks. The nearest settlement is 250 kilometers away, and only the hardiest hikers risk the trek.

Now 77, the babushka has lived in this remote encampment since the day she was born. Her father, Karp, built it by hand after fleeing religious persecution under Stalin, and Agafya has no plans to leave now. She continues to lead the life her family taught her: an introspective life of prayer and routine, far from society.

She’s often described as a hermit, but Agafya is far from a recluse. Lately, more and more people have been coming to visit. She needs help chopping wood and feeding the goats in her old age. This help comes in the form of short expeditions by park rangers from Khakassia Nature Reserve, volunteers from the Volnoe Delo Foundation, and, in the summer holidays, university students keen to help out.

Taiga Mother

On July 28, 2021, Agafya’s home caught fire after a candle started a blaze that spread to the roof. Visiting volunteers helped put the fire out, but not before it had done substantial damage. The Volnoe Delo Foundation – one of Russia’s largest charitable organizations – not only refurbished her damaged hut but also built her a new one after Agafya sent a request to its founder, industrialist Oleg Deripaska. Agafya is a meticulous woman: a new stove was built to her exact specifications, and she measured it from every angle with a ruler, rejecting anything that didn’t precisely match the dimensions of her old family stove.

It is here, outside her new hut, that Agafya bumped into a family of bears a few weeks ago. Brown bears are commonly found throughout the taiga – the 13 million square kilometer forest that carpets Russia – from the Urals in the west to the Pacific in the east. But, due to an unfortunate confluence of factors – plentiful vegetation and relatively low snowfall – they are particularly abundant in Agafya’s neck of the woods.

“Just two weeks ago, a family of four bears came down that slope just there,” she indicates the crag right next to her hut, studded irregularly with spindly pine trees. “They sat here in my garden,” she says simply, shrugging.

Living On A Prayer

It would be difficult to overstate the frugality of Agafya’s lifestyle. Five to six hours a day are devoted to prayer, while menial tasks like feeding the goats, baking bread, and tending the garden usually take up the remaining daylight hours.

Worship is a very serious affair at Agafya’s. She enters her new hut every morning clutching a rosary that she made herself out of fish bones. Striking two rocks together, she proceeds to light a pile of straw, which she grasps with her bare, soot-blackened hands, and deposits in the stove. Then she lights a skinny candle and presses it into a thin notch in the shelf above her makeshift altar, where its guttering light dances over a row of richly painted icons. Agafya intones the words from a book of prayer in a high drone, reminiscent of Gregorian plainchant. She continues this way for several hours. Occasionally she crosses herself, prostrates, or genuflects. Her prayers are punctuated with the mumbled refrain “Bless us, Lord.”

After her prayers, Agafya turns to her books. All are religious texts, and all are written in Old Church Slavonic, an ecclesiastical ancestor of modern Russian. The oldest book in her possession is the Gospels, which was passed down from her father’s father, and which she claims is 400 years old. This has an elaborate wrought iron cover, and she handles it with excruciating delicacy, touching its hallowed pages only through a cloth.

This rule-bound, monastic existence is Agafya’s way of life. But it is also precisely what sustained her and her family through the harshest challenges that nature and society could concoct. “If I don’t feed the goats before bed, I simply won’t be able to go to sleep,” she explains. “The goats must be fed.”

As It Was In The Beginning…

Patriarch Nikon’s efforts to reform the Russian Orthodox Church and harmonize its liturgical practices with those of its Greek Orthodox cousin caused a schism. Those who resisted the reforms were known as Old Believers and became pariahs, deprived of civil rights. This happened in 1666 and has been forgotten by most Russians. For Agafya, however, this history is a painful fact of life.

The reverberations of this momentous seventeenth-century rift can be acutely felt in Agafya’s everyday life. Her most prized heirloom is a medallion of Archpriest Avvakum Petrov, the leader of the Old Believers at the time of the schism. She is also careful to cross herself in keeping with the Old Rite, her thumb reaching down to touch her ring finger and pinky to represent the Holy Trinity, while her middle and index fingers hover slightly above the other three, representing Jesus’ dual divine and human nature.

“The story of babushka Agafya is about human strength and perseverance, full devotion to one’s beliefs and faith, which preordained Agafya’s way of living,” says Ruben Bunyatyan of the Volnoe Delo Foundation. “She is carrying forward a unique cultural code and is a living memory of an era dating to before Peter the Great that survived against all odds. Over the years, this culture came to be largely associated with Siberia.”

After fleeing deeper and deeper into Siberia to escape tsarist persecution, Agafya’s family finally left society and headed for the mountains in 1936, after Stalin’s death squads shot Karp’s brother. Agafya was born seven years later. She did not see any other humans until an expedition of Soviet geologists stumbled across their camp in 1978. “We saw how the contraption landed, and we were very scared. People got out of the helicopter, and one of them, Sedov, decided to stay.”

From then on, Agafya’s family became a sensation. The society that had forced them to the margins for over three hundred years now idolized them, with Agafya’s face beaming down from magnets and soap packaging on the shelves of every souvenir shop.

Hide-And-Seek

Nonetheless, it can get lonely up in the mountains.

“I miss my people,” Agafya’s eyes glaze over. “They died 40 years ago now.” The only remaining constants are her cats. Her face lights up when one of them rubs itself fondly against her shin. When asked what his name is, she looks bemused and chortles “Nothing. I call him cat.”

She has also grown fond of her helpers, who brave -50˚C temperatures and 16-hour hovercraft trips to check up on her. One of the park rangers tells me that she has even taken to playing hide-and-seek with one younger helper. “It’s always nice to help good people,” says Nikita, aged 23, who volunteers with the Volnoe Delo Foundation. “Besides, it’s peaceful here, you can switch off your brain. These days, people are always rushing back and forth, and there are gadgets everywhere. Here, time works differently.”

In the evening, Agafya comes down to the army tent where volunteers are eating plov around a trestle table. She sits by the stove and watches with curiosity as a heated discussion about world affairs breaks out.

This is no place for politics. Presented with a picture of Putin, Agafya nods uncertainly. “He’s the one in my calendar.” Then she turns to more pressing matters. “The frost has come,” she sighs.

Agafya retires for the evening, and picks her way up the steep slope that separates the campsite from her home above. Halfway up the hill, the path divides. The way to the left has been cleared of ice and snow, with a wooden handrail and rough steps carved into the hard earth. The way to the right is narrow and steep, covered in ice and scree. Agafya does not hesitate, she turns to the right and continues her steady struggle up the hill.