Agafia Lykova, a 70-year-old hermit from Siberia, is preparing to return to her isolated life in the wilderness after receiving medical treatment for a leg pain. She was discharged from a hospital in Tashtagol, a town in the Kemerovo region, on Tuesday, but will remain there until state emergency services can airlift her back home, according to the Russian news site Sobesednik.ru.
Lykova was taken to hospital last week after she alerted authorities to her leg pain via satellite phone. She was born in the Siberian wilderness near the Mongolian border, where her parents—members of the Old Believers sect, which broke away from the Orthodox church in the 17th century—fled in the late 1930s to escape religious persecution in the Soviet Union. The family lived in complete isolation until geologists discovered them in 1978.
Since her father's death in 1988, Lykova has lived alone. Although she has left the wilderness for short periods on several occasions, she prefers the familiarity of rural Siberia. In an interview with the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, she expressed her discomfort with city life, saying: 'There are so many cars. Why do you need so many? There’s so much smoke from them, there’s nothing to breathe.'
