In 1978, a team of Soviet geologists flying over a remote corner of Siberia spotted something impossible: a garden, deep in the forest, about two weeks’ walk from the nearest settlement. Down below lived a family that had cut itself off from the rest of the world for about four decades.
In short
- The Lykovs, a family of Old Believers, fled religious persecution under Stalin in the 1930s.
- They settled deep in the taiga near the Abakan River, in the Sayan Mountains of southern Siberia.
- Soviet geologists discovered them by chance in 1978.
- The last survivor, Agafia Lykova, still lives there alone.
Fleeing into the forest
The Lykovs were Old Believers, followers of a 17th-century form of Russian Orthodoxy. In the 1930s, fleeing Stalin’s persecution of religious groups, they disappeared into southern Siberia’s taiga, near the Abakan River in the Sayan Mountains, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. The nearest settlement is about two weeks’ walk away.
There, they lived without priests, without modern technology, and without bread, as Newser summed up. The children grew up without ever seeing a wheel.
The garden seen from the sky
In 1978, Soviet geologists on a mineral prospecting mission over the Sayan Mountains spotted a lone garden deep in the forest. They expected rocks. Instead, they found a family living as if time had stopped decades earlier.
Life had been extremely hard. “Back then we had no salt,” Agafia later recalled. She told RFE/RL she first saw a satellite at 17, and described it as a moving star.
Contact, and its cost
Within a few years of the geologists’ arrival, every member of the family except Agafia, born in 1945, had died. Her father, Karp Lykov, died in the late 1980s, nearly three decades before RFE/RL’s 2015 report. Agafia chose to stay, alone, in the place where she had spent her whole life. Her speech still mixes archaic words and religious terms, a trace of the world her family had preserved.
Agafia today
She still lives alone in the taiga. She grows potatoes, carrots, turnips and onions and gathers cedar cones. Her faith forbids items with barcodes, such as matches or medicines. “A Christian can never be lonely,” she told RFE/RL. A piece of a Russian Proton rocket even lies a few minutes’ walk from her home, since the area sits under the flight path of launches from Baikonur.
Her isolation isn’t total anymore. According to Newser, in January 2026, her life now includes a helicopter SOS button and a cabin funded by billionaire Oleg Deripaska, and her story has a growing presence on YouTube. Survival stories like hers fascinate because they show how much people can endure with very little, like the sailor who survived 24 days at sea.
The limit
Some details of the Lykovs’ story have been told and retold for decades, and accounts vary on exact dates. We stuck to what RFE/RL and Newser report. And this is not a romantic tale: the family’s isolation was born from persecution, and their contact with the outside world was followed by tragedy.
That’s the story.
