Authorities of southwest Siberia's Kemerovo Region delivered in Moscow a shirt made for the Russian president by the last surviving member of a Russian Old-Believer family in the wilds of the Siberian taiga, a spokesman for the local administration said on Thursday.
"The shirt and other gifts have been sent to the presidential administration," the spokesman told RIA Novosti.
Agafya Lykova's taiga neighbor, hunter Yerofei Sedov, heard on the radio that President Dmitry Medvedev was visiting the Siberian Federal District on February 10-12 and told the hermit that the president had praised Siberia.
After that, Lykova, 66, decided to sew a shirt for Medvedev and give him a handmade birch-bark basket and pine nuts.
She also invited the president to visit her after Easter that will be celebrated on April 4.
The hermit sent her gifts via Vladimir Makuta, the head of the Tashtagol district, who had brought her presents from the Kemerovo governor, Aman Tuleyev, that included hay and oats for her goats, corn for her chickens, potatoes, medicine, candles, fruit, a Swiss knife and chrysanthemums in the wake of March 8, International Women's Day.
Tuleyev first met Lykova in 1997 when he visited her home in the wilderness and the two have been exchanging letters ever since.
Agafya Lykova's family has been living in the taiga of the Siberian republic of Khakasia since the 1930s, when her father took them to the wilderness to "purge their souls of the modern world."
The Lykovs subsequently lived for decades in self-imposed isolation, without any modern conveniences, some 300 km (186 miles) away from civilization. They were eventually discovered by a group of Soviet geologists in 1978, but resisted efforts to return to modern society.
The Old Believers split from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century in a dispute over liturgical practices, including a disagreement over the correct number of fingers, two or three, to cross oneself with. They also consider shaving to be a grave sin.
Agafya's siblings - Savin, Dmitry, and Natalya - died one after another in 1981 from what is believed to have been a virus, and her father, Karp, died seven years later. Nevertheless, Agafya still refused to leave the taiga.
KEMEROVO, February 25 (RIA Novosti)
