The hermit who suddenly decided she was a people person after all

Agafya Lykova, who is now nearly 70, is the sole survivor of the Lykov family who decided to cut themselves off from civilisation in 1936. But she has wrote to a Siberian newspaper begging for another Christian to come and live with her at her home which is hundreds of miles from its nearest town. She wrote: 'I don't know how God will help me survive the winter. There aren't any logs. I need to get them into the house and I need to keep reading prayers. 'I'm suffocating and I am getting too cold while doing it when the weather is freezing. 'Here is my battle for survival, alone and with the house to look after and things to do, all round the clock until I suffer exhaustion'. Her parents decided to cut themselves off from civilisation in 1936 to escape persecution faced under Stalin. According to The Siberian Times she was born in either 1944 or 1945 and it was not until 1978 that their hermit huts were spotted from the air in the Sayan Mountains by a party of Soviet geologists. She wrote to the 'Krasnoyarsky Rabochiy' newspaper: 'I am all alone, my years are big, my health is bad, I keep getting ill.'There is a lump on my right breast, and my strength is going. There is a need for a person, a helper, assuming there are kind people in the world, as the world has always had kind people.'With tears and cry we beg you, in the name of Christ, not to leave me alone and pay mercy to an orphan in need. There must be Christians around.'She explained how last summer her potato crop was at risk from flooding by a nearby river. However, officials visit Agafya every year to check she is okay.To reach her it takes two days hovercrafting along rivers and catching a boat before trekking the final stetch on foot. Her father was Karp Lykov who led the family into the wilderness. His sons were Savvin, 45, and Dmitry, 36, and daughters Natalya, 42, and Agafya, who was 34 when they were found. The children's mother Akulina had died in 1961.Her siblings died in the 1980s and Agafya's only companions is now two nanny goats, a male goat, eight cats, a rooster, hens and a dog called Taiga.(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az