In 1936, the Lykov family left civilization and went to live deep in the Siberian forest, where they stayed in total isolation until 1978.
Wikimedia CommonsKarp Lykov and two of his children, Dmitry and Agafia.
In 1978, a helicopter pilot was flying over the forests of Siberia when he spotted something baffling: a clearing several thousand feet up a mountainside.
To his surprise, the clearing had what appeared to be long furrows, which seemed to indicate that people were living there. This mountain, however, was more than 150 miles from the nearest known human settlement. Furthermore, Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living in the district.
The pilot had been sent to find a spot to land a group of geologists who were in the district to prospect for iron ore. When the geologists learned of the pilot’s sighting, they decided to investigate.
After going up the mountain, they discovered a log cabin beside a stream. The cabin consisted of a single room that was cramped, musty, filthy, and cold. Its floor was made up of potato peel and pine-nut shells. It was hard to believe that anyone actually lived there.
But, incredibly, the cabin housed a family of five. As the geologists got to know the Lykov family, they learned their remarkable story.
The Lykov Family’s Great Escape Into The Taiga
Wikimedia CommonsKarp Lykov, the patriarch of the family.
The Lykov family patriarch was an old man named Karp who belonged to a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect known as the Old Believers. Following the atheist Bolsheviks’ takeover of Russia in 1917, Old Believers faced persecution.
The Bolsheviks outlawed Christianity and murdered Karp’s brother on the outskirts of his village in 1936. Karp quickly responded by gathering his family and abandoning civilization altogether.
He took his wife, Akulina, and their two children, Savin and Natalia, deep into the Siberian forest, where the family lived in isolation for the next four decades.
During their time in the wild, the Lykov family had two more children, Dmitry and Agafia. Neither of these children would see a human being who was not a member of their own family until their discovery by the geologists in 1978.
Life In One Of Earth’s Harshest Environments
Despite the Lykov family being able to produce two children while in the wilderness, the isolation made it extremely difficult for everyone to survive.
They had to use hemp cloth to replace their clothing and create galoshes with birchbark to replace their shoes. When their kettles rusted, birchbark was the best thing they could get to make replacements. Because these could not be placed in a fire, cooking became much more difficult.
When a snowstorm killed their crop in 1961, the family was forced to eat shoes and bark. Akulina chose to die of starvation so that her children would not go hungry.
Wikimedia CommonsKarp and Agafia Lykov at their secluded taiga home.
Given the hardships that the family endured in the wilderness, it is surprising how reluctant they were to accept help from the geologists and leave the forest.
Initially, the only gift that the family would accept from the geologists was salt. When they first presented the Lykov children with foods like jam or bread, for instance, the children replied that they were not allowed to eat it. Their father, when asked if he’d eaten bread before, replied, “I have. But they have not. They have never seen it.”
Eventually, however, they ended up accepting knives, forks, handles, grain, pens, paper, and an electric torch.
Isolation And Revelations Of A Changed World
Gradually over the course of their conversations, the geologists informed Karp Lykov of events his family had missed — including the Second World War. Upon learning of it, Karp shook his head and said, “What is this, a second time, and always the Germans. A curse on Peter. He flirted with them. That is so.”
That wasn’t all the Lykovs had missed, though. The world beyond their little cabin had changed, and changed rapidly. Televisions were commonplace, the Soviet Union had become a global superpower, and mankind had landed on the moon.
Vasily Peskov/Lost in the TaigaThe small cabin where the Lykov family lived.
Their reaction to these events was mixed. The Holocaust had baffled Karp Lykov and reaffirmed his belief that leaving society behind was the correct choice, but there was little doubt that it had made life difficult as well. They were living primarily off of potato patties mixed with ground rye and hemp seeds. Famine was an ever-looming threat.
“We ate the rowanberry lea, roots, grass, mushrooms, potato tops, and bark,” Agafia recalled of the late 1950s, which she called the Hungry Years. “We were hungry all the time. Every year we held a council to decide whether to eat everything up or leave some for seed.”
Vasily Peskov/Lost in the TaigaThe Lykov’s home, seen from above.
The geologists even introduced the Lykovs to television, as they carried a small portable one among their possessions. Despite the family believing the television was a thing of sin, they would often meet the geologists at their camp, their eyes transfixed on the moving picture box before them.
“The old man prayed afterward,” geologist Yerofei Sedov recalled, “diligently and in one fell swoop.”
For the most part, though, the Lykovs seemed content to maintain their isolation. Unfortunately, that stubbornness beget tragedy, as suddenly, in 1981, Savin, Natalia, and Dmitri died suddenly within a few days of one another.
Agafia Lykov, The Last Surviving Member Of Her Family
When Dmitry got pneumonia, the geologists offered to get a helicopter to take him to a hospital. But he was unwilling to abandon his family and told the geologists, “A man lives for howsoever God grants.”
Wikimedia CommonsAgafia Lykov is still alive, living in a newly constructed cabin in the Siberian wilderness.
Some have speculated that the children’s deaths were due to the geologists exposing them to germs to which they had no immunity. However, journalist Vasily Peskov — the author of a 1992 book on the Lykov family entitled Lost in the Taiga — states that this was not the case and that Savin and Natalia suffered from kidney failure.
Either way, following the deaths, the geologists tried to persuade Karp and his remaining child, Agafia, to leave the forest. Both refused to do so; they were devoted to their simple lifestyle.
Following her father’s death in 1988, Agafia became the only living member of the Lykov family. In a 2013 interview with Vice, she said of her father’s death, “When he died, I had nobody left to help me or to rely on. I cut firewood myself.”
Vasily Peskov/Lost in the TaigaThe graves of the Lykov family.
Life wasn’t quite as lonely as it had once been, though. Yerofei Sedov, whose camp once lived near the Lykovs, eventually returned to the taiga after gangrene left him without a leg. He began living down the slope from Agafia, but his presence was more of a nuisance to her than anything else — and she didn’t refrain from criticizing him.
“Yerofei is a waste,” Agafia said. “Nobody needs him. He is not a helper. He needs to be helped.”
Despite her harsh comments, the two still got together at Sedov’s every now and then to listen to the radio together.
She made headlines again in January 2016 when she, then 71, was airlifted to a hospital to be treated for a leg issue — only to then return to the forest that has always been her home.
After this look at the Lykov family, have a look at the most remote places in all of human civilization and read up on some of the craziest stories of survival in the wilderness.
