NOVOKUZNETSK, January 17 (RIA Novosti) – Russian authorities said they will dispatch a helicopter with food and other supplies to an elderly dweller of the Siberian taiga who had no contact with civilization until she was 33.
Agafya Lykova, 68, pleaded for help in a letter she managed to send out from her riverside hut to the Krasnoyarsky Rabochy regional newspaper.
The letter is written in block letters and employs obsolete pre-revolutionary orthography, according to a photocopy on the newspaper’s website.
Lykova claims in the letter that her health is deteriorating, which made it hard for her to prepare supplies for another cold season in the taiga.
Temperatures in the area of the Abakan Ridge in the republic of Khakassia average minus 19 degrees Celsius (minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit).
A helicopter will fly next week to Lykova’s residence, carrying food, thread, 20 bales of hay and other necessities, the press service of Kemerovo Governor Aman Tuleyev said Friday.
Tuleyev, whose jurisdiction borders Khakassia, has taken interest in Lykova before, visiting her several times since 1997.
Lykova belongs to the Old Believers, a religious movement that splintered from the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th century and has endured centuries of persecution ever since.
She is the last of a family that settled on the Bolshoi Abakan River in the 1930s and lived there in isolation until a geologist search party stumbled on them in 1978.
The Lykovs subsided mainly on trapped wild animals and cultivated potatoes. They had no firearms, no salt and did not know how to make bread.
Lykova’s residence is separated from the nearest human settlement by 120 kilometers (75 miles) of hard-to-traverse taiga.
It remained unclear how she managed to get her letter to the newspaper. She also asked in her letter for a volunteer helper to live with her.
The hermit has voiced such a call before, but nobody managed to endure the isolation, the harsh taiga climate and her heavy temper, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper said Friday.
