A family, found in the middle of the icy Taiga forest in Serbia, had cut off from the world and spent 33 years without knowing that World War 2 had happened.
The Taiga forest in Siberia is one of the last great wildernesses on earth. The only inhabitants of these wild lands are usually bears and wolves prowling five million square miles of pristine nature.
In 1978, a team of Soviet geologists prospecting for minerals spotted what they thought were signs of human life from their helicopter.
But as they circled back it became clear, here in a spot that had never been explored, next to a river with no name, 150 miles from the nearest human settlement, was a clearing in the forest with what looked like crops growing.
The four geologists landed and set up their basecamp about 10 miles from the little clearing they had spotted on the mountainside overlooking the river.
Geologist Galina Pismenskaya recalled the moment she met the man who lived there: “He looked frightened and was very attentive. We had to say something, so I began: ‘Greetings, grandfather! We’ve come to visit!’”
“The old man did not reply immediately but finally we heard a soft, uncertain voice: ‘Well, since you have travelled this far, you might as well come in.’”
The geologists team found out that the man was living there with his family, five people in all, in a small, fire-blackened shed filled with birch-bark containers of cut-up.
As the stunned scientists listened, the man revealed the amazing story of how they had come to end up in the middle of the wilderness.
The father, Karp Lykov, spoke Russian and revealed he came from a sect of fundamentalist Russian Orthodox Christians called the Old Believers who had long been persecuted by the Tzar and then the Communists.
One day in 1936 a Communist patrol had appeared in their remote village and shot Karp’s brother while the two had been working in the fields together. A terrified Karp had gathered his family and fled into the forest.
The family, his wife, Akulina; a son named Savin, 9 years old, and daughter Natalia, 2, took some seeds and retreated ever deeper into the forest over the following years, until they ended up at the remote spot the geologists had spotted from the air.
The two youngest children, Dmitry and Agafia, had been born in the wilderness in 1940 and 1943 and had never seen a human who was not a member of their family, and spoke in their own odd language.
Their only reading matter was prayer books and an ancient family Bible. Akulina had used the gospels to teach her children to read and write, using sharpened birch sticks dipped into honeysuckle juice as pen and ink.
The hardship of their lives was unimaginable, the family had made shoes from tree bark, patched their clothes with hemp cloth they had grown from seed and lived in a state of near-starvation.
They had no idea World War 2 had happened or that man had landed on the moon, although Karp had guessed about satellites after seeing the “quickly moving stars”.
In 1981 three of the four children died, two from kidney failure possibly due to their harsh diet, and Dimitry of pneumonia, which might have begun as an infection caught from the outsiders.
Neither Karp or daughter Agafia would leave their remote home, despite offers to reunite them with their old village, and Karp died there in 1988. Agafia stayed on alone, saying that the Lord would provide. Now in her seventies, Afagia still lives there, alone in the wilderness she has known her whole life.
