British director to tell the tale of Agafia Lykova , the only remaining member of a family of Old Believers who fled to remote Siberian taiga in 1936

Agafia Lykova emerges from the thick forest on the banks of the Abakan river looking like an image from Russian folklore. Dressed in black sackcloth and a tattered headscarf with a triangular prayer amulet around her neck, she greets the visitors arriving by helicopter from another world.

Seventy-year-old Lykova lives a two-week walk, her only means of transport, away from the nearest human settlement in the industrial town of Tashtagol.

She has lived here all her life, and is the sole surviving member of a family who fled Stalin’s religious persecution in 1936. Her last remaining relative, her father Karp Lykov, died 30 years ago.

Since then Lykova’s only company has been a former Soviet geologist who built a hut nearby after discovering the family homestead. She has been completely alone since he died earlier this year.

Now a team of British film-makers have made the journey to Lykova’s wilderness home to record her life for a documentary expected to be released next year.

Lykova’s family were Old Believers – a Russian Orthodox sect that broke away from the main church 350 years ago. After witnessing the crackdown on religious beliefs under Stalin’s rule, the family fled to the Sayan mountains in a remote area of Siberia close to the Mongolian border, with only the possessions they could carry and some seeds.

Lykova and her brother Dmitry were born in the wilderness, and grew up without seeing anyone other than their parents and older brother and sister.

Soviet geologists

The family lived in complete isolation for decades until a group of Soviet geologists flying over the Sayan mountains on a mineral prospecting mission discovered them in 1978.

From the geologists the Lykovs learned that Stalin was dead and his era of repression over, and that the Soviet Union was an industrial power proud of its participation in a world war they had never heard of.

Within a few years, however, all the other members of the family had passed away. Lykova formed a friendship with Yerofei Sedov, the master driller in the geological expedition, who came to live in a hut 100 metres from her home 18 years ago, after losing a leg from frostbite.

Her religion forbids her using items marked with a barcode – including matches and medicines

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Agafia Lykova with a piece of space debris in her forest. Photograph: Sarah Cunningham

A small woman with a face and forearms as dark as the cedar pine cones she collects from the forest, Lykova says her life is organised around her religious beliefs and daily liturgical rites.



Her religion forbids her from using items marked with a barcode – including matches and medicines. Asked if she ever gets lonely, she says her faith keeps her company. “A Christian can never be lonely. Every Christian has their guardian angel as well as Christ and the Apostles. I have an icon that has been blessed. I am never lonely as I always have Christ with me.”

Entirely self-sufficient, Lykova grows potatoes, carrots, turnips, onions and other vegetables on a small patch of ground that her family cleared decades ago, fringed by the forest on a steep south-facing slope above the river Abakan.

Asked whether life is better now or before the family made contact with the outside world, Lykova has a simple answer: “Back then we had no salt.”

Her speech mixes ancient words and religious terms, sometimes making it difficult for Russian speakers to understand her. Clothing is not odezhda but lopatinkha, good is not khorosho but basko.



The Sayan mountains lie under the flight path of rockets launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and the area is littered with space debris. A large piece of a Russian Proton rocket is wedged into the roots of a fallen tree on the banks of the river near her homestead.

It felt like arriving in the future – to a world with no technology, the vast forest littered with discarded space junk Rebecca Marshall, film-maker

Lykova remembers seeing a satellite for the first time when she was 17. “It was a summer night,” she says. “I was sitting outside by a small fire and was looking up into the stars and noticed one that was moving. How strange, stars don’t move like that, I thought. Later, we would sometimes hear explosions and things fell from the sky.”

That the outside world would eventually encroach on Lykova’s solitude was, perhaps, inevitable. But she hopes the interest in her story will help her spread her religion.



“The world is going to ruin; I feel it is my duty to share my faith with those who come here,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Film-makers Rebecca Marshall and and Sarah Cunningham overlooking Agafia’s homestead. Photograph: Elena Andreicheva

When British film director Rebecca Marshall first heard about Lykova’s life, she was gripped. “For two years I couldn’t stop thinking about this incredible woman surviving alone in the Siberian wilderness. It seemed like both a paradise away from our world of mass communication, and a nightmare of loneliness.”

She said the reality of Lykova’s circumstances had surprised her. “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. It is an incredible and beautiful place.”

The documentary, The Forest in Me, is intended as “a meditation on the nature of individual human identity”, she says.

Marshall, along with the director of photography, Sarah Cunningham, and Ukrainian-born assistant director, Elena Andreicheva, raised more than £14,000 in a crowdfunding campaign to get the project off the ground and received funding from Creative Europe.

A version of this article appeared on Russia Beyond the Headlines

• This article was amended on 17 November 2015 to correct the name of the documentary funder