A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot: In 1978, Soviet scientists stumbled upon a family living in a remote part of Russia. They hadn’t interacted with outsiders for decades. Almost half a century later, one of them is still there (Sophie Pinkham, 1/22/26, The Guardian)
None of the Lykov children had ever seen bread. But when the geologists offered them a loaf and some jam, they refused. “We are not allowed that,” they said, in a refrain that would become familiar to all their visitors. Natalia and Agafia were hard to understand, not only because of their archaic vocabulary but also because of an odd, chanting cadence that one geologist described as “a slow, blurred cooing”.
The Lykovs were Old Believers, members of the Orthodox Christian schismatic sect whose history is deeply bound up with that of the forest and the countryside. The Old Believers emerged in the mid-17th century after Patriarch Nikon, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, amended the liturgy to bring it into harmony with the Greek Orthodox version. The reforms altered the spelling of “Jesus” – at a time when letters were understood as something close to the literal flesh of God – and changed the number of fingers to be raised when making the sign of the cross from two to three.
Those who rejected these innovations became known as Old Believers. To the rebels, who soon broke into many different branches, Nikon’s reforms were a betrayal of the true Christianity. Their anger fed on broader social injustices of the era and was further stoked by the notorious lack of respect for Russian Orthodoxy shown by Peter the Great. A self-consciously westernising tsar, Peter preferred the gods Bacchus and Mars.
In the early days of the schism, Old Believers were burned alive, tortured and imprisoned for their faith. Many were cast into pits in the ground. They believed that they bore a tremendous burden – the preservation of the true words of God – and their extreme ways of living reflected this sense of responsibility. As the whole world fell into sin, they maintained their purity. While they awaited the end of the world, they maintained strict rules about diet (for the Lykovs, no bread or jam), clothing, everyday practices and the adoption of new technology. Some Old Believers and other religious dissidents resorted to self-immolation. Whole communities locked themselves in their village churches and set them aflame.
Others took refuge in the forest, the safest place to hide from the authorities and preserve their way of life without risk of contamination by the outside world. Many branches of Old Believers were “priestless”, meaning that a family could worship without the help of a professional man of God. For the most radical Old Believers, holiness was directly correlated to isolation. The highest holiness was the life of the hermit. In the Bible hermits retreated to the desert; in Russia they retreated to the forest. But they called the forest a desert, deriving the names for hermits and for monasteries from the same word. The forest was the wasteland of holiness, the emptiness of God.