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Volunteers organize an expedition to the taiga hermit several times a year. Not only do they help her run the household, but also record stories from her life that Agafya tells them.

The taiga hermit Agafya Karpovna is not just the most famous representative of the Old Believers in the world. In the age of information technology she has become a real cultural phenomenon. The last of the Lykovs family is the bearer of a unique history and traditions that many would like to get the feel of.

Volunteers of MIREA – ����Vlog��ý have been helping her for the past eight years. During this time, students have become real chroniclers of the life story of Agafya Lykova from the moment when her name was already undeservedly forgotten, to one of the most dramatic pages of her life, where there was a fire at home, and even the coronavirus pandemic that reached the taiga.

Help from student volunteers

For almost 35 years, Agafya Karpovna has lived alone in the impassable forests near the Erinat River, which is in the territory of the Khakassky nature reserve. Here, after long wanderings, the Lykovs family of Old Believers fled from persecution and dispossession. The father of the family with four children was discovered in the summer of 1978 by geologists when they were conducting aerial surveys in the very upper reaches of Abakan.

Today, the small farm of Agafya Lykova has become a real, albeit hard-to-reach, landmark of Khakassia. Goats, dogs, cats, chickens and a garden where she grows beets, peas, potatoes, and cabbage. She sows rye and wheat, which she reaps with a sickle in autumn. Everything has remained exactly like in the old days.

But the years take their toll, at the age of 78 it becomes more and more difficult to manage the zaimka (a small lodge in Siberia), so the students of the Moscow ����Vlog��ý MIREA – known for its volunteer center with a developed wide network of volunteer expeditions throughout the country, - took the hermit under their guardianship. 

Igor Tarasov, Vice-rector of the University recalls his personal story of acquaintance with Agafya back in 2011, when one of the groups of volunteers went to Baikal to organize hiking trails. It was then that one of the employees of the Pribaikalsky National Park said that in the Khakass taiga, the lost hermit Agafya Lykova needed help: to prepare stock feed for the animals for the winter, and simply chop firewood, so that she could warm herself. Since then, every year vice-rector sends expeditions to the upper reaches of Abakan.

For the first two years, volunteers traveled by river, the 300-kilometer upstream journey took several days. We also had to drag the boats through creases and shallow rifts. The route is not for everyone: either you fall into a crevice in the forest, or the cable of the outboard motor breaks on snags sticking out of the crevice. The group came to Agafya drenched to the skin. Considering how much work there was to get Grandma ready for winter, an alternative way to get to her destination had to be found. So, a year later, they found sponsors who help the group, and deliver them by helicopter.

Expeditions to the hermit have become a good tradition

As you know, the character of the hermit is firm, as it should be for people living in harsh conditions. But if you make friends with someone, then the friendship lasts forever. This is what happened to the students of ����Vlog��ý MIREA. During the first visit, the volunteers spent only two or three days at Agafya's estate: they worked, talked, and made friends. And in the end, Agafya went to see them off walking to the boat a kilometer and a half, and as a parting gift she gave them a pebble.

Now targeted expeditions to Lykova have become a good tradition of the University. It would seem difficult to believe that two diametrically different worlds could have made friends: high technology, digital world and the hermitage? The students acknowledge that they teach each other a lot. The young people saw firewood, arrange woodpile. And the girls have even learned to harvest grass with a sickle.

They showed Agafya how to use firecrackers to drive away bears from the house and livestock. Now every time she asks to bring pyrotechnics, such a non-trivial tool turned out to be indispensable in the household. As a sign of gratitude, she always treats the students to products from her garden and bakes bread for them on yeast-free sourdough according to an old recipe.

But, according to Vice-Rector Igor Tarasov, who oversees the University's volunteer center, practical skills for surviving in adverse conditions are only a fraction of what Agafya has taught the young people.

Once, volunteers say, they went with her to the old house where Agafya and her family used to live for 40 years. To visit the graves of relatives, they walked across the river and a steep mountain. A long hike with two overnight stays, but everyone was overwhelmed with her endurance.

In such outings, Agafya shares with the visitors unique stories of her life, tells jokes and folk horror stories that she heard from her father. She told them the story of her birth and how Karp Lykov begged the taiga for his daughter to stay alive. Over the years of targeted expeditions, students have collected gems of information for a whole biographical book, where there is a chapter about a fire in the old hermit's house, and the author's words: “Will you come again? Do you happen to know? Have you ever been there?”

Students are trying to imitate Agafya’s speech, they talk and exchange jokes in the university corridors. They even compiled their own Agafya’s “slang dictionary”. For example, “Kavo-o-o” is translated as surprised “What are you doing?”. With her melodious deliberate accent, each phrase is weighty and to the point. And these are also important observations of students to the information portrait of the hermit.

She, as the primary source, tells all the news to them: for the first time she spoke about a mysterious illness, presumably a coronavirus, which she had been taken ill with and got cured of last winter.

Sketches from the life of Agafya formed the basis for the video in Ru-tube

With the same students, she celebrated important milestones: they visit her in early August, when two church holidays are generally celebrated, and, when circumstances permit, in the winter, on New Year's Eve. They bring gifts: nuts, fruit and dried fruits which keep longer. A winter visit takes only three or four hours, but each time they manage to ask Agafya about her life.

She does not celebrate either the New Year, or her birthday – these are not Christian holidays, but she does not allow the students to work on church holidays. That is not allowed. However, she herself rejoices, dresses up, congratulates people, manages to stand a six-hour service.

As for Christmas, volunteers recall, this is what she said: when they lived in a family, they did not give gifts to each other. There was no such custom, what gifts may there be in the taiga? But Christmas services were always held. And they used to be very long.

Sketches from the life of Agafia have already formed the basis of the music video in Ru-tube. The video, same as the song, turned out to be heartfelt: “Is it really true? Or does it only seem to me that the snow is falling like grammar commas. The soul will go into hibernation, the brown bear will turn silver-gray in the snow”. The footage, where the grandmother, smiling like a child, tells the guests one of her stories or looks around her house – the taiga, will be enough for a large documentary film cycle. His students are also actively filming and posting their videos on the Ru-tube channel. They brought new footage from a recent expedition, from where they returned just the other day.

As they say in ����Vlog��ý MIREA, Agafya has become a creative muse for students, but even more than that. She is a living example of diligence, fortitude, unbroken faith and perseverance. In the age of information business and even information muddle, imaginary idols, Agafya Lykova becomes the right guide and inspiring role model for the new generation. Being the bearer of unique original traditions and values, it literally passes on historical memory, and spiritual experience, and intangible cultural heritage to the next generation.