Group items tagged

more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement,

Well, since you have traveled this far, you might as well come in.'

omething from the middle ages. Jerry-built from whatever materials came to hand, the dwelling was not much more than a burrow—"a low, soot-blackened log kennel that was as cold as a cellar," with a floor consisting of potato peel and pine-nut shells. Looking around in the dim light, the visitors saw that it consisted of a single room. It was cramped, musty and indescribably filthy, propped up by sagging joists—and, astonishingly, home to a family of five:

Have you ever eaten bread?

he daughters spoke a language distorted by a lifetime of isolation. "When the sisters talked to each other, it sounded like a slow, blurred cooing."

a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect, worshiping in a style unchanged since the 17th century.

Peter was a personal enemy and "the anti-Christ in human form"—a point he insisted had been amply proved by Tsar's campaign to modernize Russia by forcibly "chopping off the beards of Christians."

Things had only got worse for the Lykov family when the atheist Bolsheviks took power. Under the Soviets, isolated Old Believer communities that had fled to Siberia to escape persecution began to retreat ever further from civilization. During the purges of the 1930s, with Christianity itself under assault, a Communist patrol had shot Lykov's brother on the outskirts of their village while Lykov knelt working beside him. He had responded by scooping up his family and bolting into forest.

our Lykovs then—Karp;

wife, Akulina

son named Savin

Natalia, a daughter who was only 2.

wo more children had been born in the wild—Dmitry in 1940 and Agafia in 1943—

d neither of the youngest Lykov children had ever seen a human being who was not a member of their famil

new there were places called cities where humans lived crammed together in tall buildings. They had heard there were countries other than Russia. But such concepts were no more than abstractions to them. 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. When Agafia was shown a picture of a horse, she recognized it from her mother's Bible stories. "Look, papa," she exclaimed. "A steed!"

e traversed 250 kilometres [155 miles] without seeing a single human dwelling!"

They fashioned birch-bark galoshes in place of shoes. Clothes were patched and repatched until they fell apart, then replaced with hemp cloth grown from seed.

pinning wheel a

A couple of kettles served them well for many years, but when rust finally overcame them, the only replacements they could fashion came from birch bark.

heir staple diet was potato patties mixed with ground rye and hemp seeds.

bundance

stream. Stands of larch, spruce, pine and birch yielded all that anyone could take.... Bilberries and raspberries were close to hand, firewood as well, and pine nuts fell right on the roof."

rmanently on the edge of famine.

not until the late 1950s, when Dmitry reached manhood, that they first trapped animals for their meat and skins. Lacking guns and even bows, they could hunt only by digging traps or pursuing prey across the mountains until the animals collapsed from exhaustion

Agafia's unusual speech—she had a singsong voice and stretched simple words into polysyllables—convinced some of her visitors she was slow-witted; in fact she was markedly intelligent, and took charge of the difficult task, in a family that possessed no calendars, of keeping track of time. 

mitry, a

urious and perhaps the most forward-looking member of the family

Perhaps it was no surprise that he was also the most enraptured by the scientists' technology.

many happy hours in its little sawmill, marveling at how easily a circular saw and lathes could finish wood.

he Lord would provide, and she would stay, she said—as indeed she has. A quarter of a century later, now in her seventies herself, this child of the taiga lives on alone, high above the Abakan.

Fall of the Roman Empire

Public Health

Decline in Morals and Values

Political Corruption

Unemployment

Inflation

Urban decay

THE FINAL BLOWS For years, the well-disciplined Roman army held the barbarians of Germany back. Then in the third century A. D. the Roman soldiers were pulled back from the Rhine-Danube frontier to fight civil war in Italy. This left the Roman border open to attack. Gradually Germanic hunters and herders from the north began to overtake Roman lands in Greece and Gaul (later France). Then in 476 A. D. the Germanic general Odacer or Odovacar overthrew the last of the Roman Emperors, Augustulus Romulus. From then on the western part of the Empire was ruled by Germanic chieftain. Roads and bridges were left in disrepair and fields left untilled. Pirates and bandits made travel unsafe. Cities could not be maintained without goods from the farms, trade and business began to disappear. And Rome was no more in the West. The total fall of the Roman empire.

Inferior Technology

Military Spending

most difficult problems

choosing

new emperor

new emperor

empero

never

created

effective system

determine

new emperors

began

selling

throne to

highest bidder

37 different emperors

assinatio

25 of whom