I vas vonce a greaaat beauty, vut the vilderness verrs vun avay. (Russian Dating)
70-year-old hermit who has spent her entire life in the Siberian wilderness has been airlifted to hospital to treat pain in her legs.
Agafia Lykova is the last remaining member of a deeply religious family that fled civilization in 1936 and did not know about the second world war until geologists stumbled upon them in 1978.
After she contacted the “mainland” with an emergency satellite telephone to ask for medical help, the governor, Aman Tuleyev, ordered her evacuation.
"Witsen's Shaman" in shamanic Siberia (en.wikipedia.org)
Doctors have “removed the acute pain” in her legs and plan to keep her in hospital over the next week, it said. Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported that the pain was related to cartilage deterioration.
Living in peace far from the maddening crowd
Buddhist place names Sakha, Magadha
A member of the Old Believer sect that split off from the Russian Orthodox church 350 years ago, Lykova’s father, Karp, took his wife and two children into the taiga after a Soviet patrol shot his brother.
[This led to them] eventually settling more than 150 miles (240 km) from the nearest village.
Siberia is beautiful now.
The family survived for decades on their remote homestead, where winter temperatures reach -40C, without guns, salt, or metal implements.
Outdated words and religious terms pepper her speech. She has lived alone since her father died in 1988, although bears and foxes sometimes disturb her looking for food.
Last year, the British director Rebecca Marshall began work on a documentary about Lykova, called "The Forest in Me." (See VICE video here).
Siberian Buddhist temple in Buriyat, Russia
“When I finally met Agafia, what surprised me was that rather than feeling like a primitive situation, it felt like arriving in the future – to a world with no technology, the vast forest littered with discarded space junk,” Marshall told Russia Beyondthe Headlines.
[He was] referring to the fact that Lykova’s home is under the flight path of rockets from the Baikonur cosmodrome in [formerly Buddhist] Kazakhstan. “It is an incredible and beautiful place.” More
Hermit's gorgeous homestead in Siberia is far from perpetually-frozen gulag we imagine.
In 1936, a family of Russian Old Believers journeyed deep into Siberia's vast taiga to escape persecution and protect their way of life. The Lykovs eventually settled in the Sayan [Sakyan?] Mountains, 160 miles from any other sign of civilization. In 1944, Agafia Lykov was born into this wilderness. Today she is the last surviving Lykov, remaining steadfast in her seclusion. In this episode of "Far Out," the VICE crew travels to the hermit Agafia to learn about her taiga lifestyle and the encroaching influence of the outside world.
"The Revenant" (The Revenant) Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the foreign invader and killer of many Native Americans in this all-American adventure of an American who shows true American grit in the American wilderness for all Americans to enjoy (except the Native Americans). Until that bear eats him. Meaningless pain porn. Winner of the Golden Globe for "Best Picture" and #OscarSoWhite the likely contender for the Academy Award in the same category. What is a "revenant," the opposite of a covenant? "To re-venir, to come back from a long absence."
Irish-American Hugh Glass is the original source of Hollywood's "The Revenant."
Hugh Glass (c. 1780–1833) was an Irish-American fur trapper and frontiersman noted for his exploits in the American West during the first third of the 19th century.
Glass was born in Pennsylvania, to Irish parents. He was an explorer of the watershed of the Upper Missouri River in present day North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. Glass was famed, most of all, as a frontier folk hero for his legendary cross-country trek after being mauled by a grizzly bear.
Glass's most famous adventure began in 1822, when he responded to an advertisement in the Missouri Gazette and Public Adviser, placed by General William Henry Ashley, which called for a corps of 100 men to "ascend the river Missouri" as part of a fur trading venture. These men would later be known as Ashley's Hundred.
(The Folklorist) The Legend of Hugh Glass who survived with help from the Sioux who killed other natives as he aided the westward imperial expansion of the U.S. stealing the land from the original inhabitants in the name of greed and Christianity.
The waters of the Arroyo Seco, Pasadena (WQ)
Besides Glass, others who joined the enterprise included notables such as James Beckwourth, Thomas Fitzpatrick, David Jackson, John Fitzgerald, William Sublette, Jim Bridger, and Jedediah Smith.
Early in the trek, Glass established himself as a hard-working fur trapper. He was apparently wounded on this trip in a battle with Arikara, and later traveled with a party of 13 men to relieve traders at Fort Henry, at the mouth of the Yellowstone River.
The expedition, led by Andrew Henry, planned to proceed from the Missouri, up the valley of the Grand River in present-day South Dakota, then across to the valley of the Yellowstone.
Bear mauling
Near the forks of the Grand River in present-day Perkins County, in August 1823, while scouting ahead of his trading partners for game for the expedition's larder, Glass surprised a grizzly bear mother with her two cubs.
Before he could fire his rifle, the bear charged, picked him up, and threw him to the ground. The bear threw his flesh to its cubs. Glass got up, grappled for his knife, and fought back, stabbing the animal repeatedly as the grizzly raked him time and again with her claws.
Glass managed to kill the bear with help from his trapping partners, Fitzgerald and Bridger, but was left badly mauled and unconscious. Henry (who was also with them) became convinced the man would not survive his injuries.
Henry asked for two volunteers to stay with Glass until he died, and then bury him. Bridger (then 19 years old) and Fitzgerald (then 23 years old) stepped forward, and as the rest of the party moved on, began digging his grave. Later claiming that they were interrupted in the task by an attack by "Arikaree" Indians, the pair grabbed Glass's rifle, knife, and other equipment, and took flight. Bridger and Fitzgerald incorrectly reported to Henry that Glass had died.
Despite his injuries, Glass regained consciousness. He did so only to find himself abandoned, without weapons or equipment, suffering from a broken leg, the cuts on his back exposing bare ribs, and all his wounds festering. Glass lay mutilated and alone, more than 200 miles (320 km) from the nearest American settlement at Fort Kiowa on the Missouri.
In one of the more remarkable treks known to history, Glass set his own leg, wrapped himself in the bear hide his companions had placed over him as a shroud, and began crawling. To prevent gangrene, Glass laid his wounded back on a rotting log and let the maggots eat the dead flesh.
How the West was Won Stolen (Wild West History) Old West Legend Jedediah Smith One hundred million Native Americans slaughtered and infected to institute the British dream of a "United States," with the help of the United Kingdom's arch-rivals, the French, who took Canada. Spain kept Mexico and much of South America. And the new U.S. went on to invade and colonize the Philippines and then Hawaii and other islands. Now the USA is the greatest imperial force in the world -- and "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world," according to MLK -- just like the ancient Romans who killed Jesus. But who cares about accurate history when we can tell ourselves feelgood stories about how this land was empty (just like Israel) and we are the greatest champions of good old Jesus.
Today few Americans have ever heard of a man called Jedediah Smith. Yet, his bold forays into the remaining Native American territories inhabited by Native American tribes and nations for 10 to 15 thousand years, which the U.S. took to calling its "Western frontier" during the early nineteenth century helped shape the course of U.S. history.
(To call it "American history" would deny the fact that most of "America" is not the USA but rather our southern and northern neighbors on the continent).
Since the early 1800s Smith's forgotten legacy has been gathering dust like so many other pioneers and explorers of his time. In this dramatic feature-length special, follow Smith as he navigates the "American West" during the exciting decade of the 1820s.
From being the first white man to recognize the significance of the South Pass in Wyoming to making the treacherous journey by land from Southern California to Oregon, Smith blazed many important trails in his time.
Featuring tales of clashing cultures and dangerous encounters bear attacks and violent battles, THE LEGEND OF JEDEDIAH SMITH brings the long-lost story of a great pioneer to life for a new generation of Americans in the United States.
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Agafia Lykova is the last remaining member of a deeply religious family that fled civilization in 1936 and did not know about the second world war until geologists stumbled upon them in 1978.
