A woman who has lived alone for 26 years in Siberia is appealing for someone to live with her because she is lonely.

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.

Her parents decided to cut themselves off from civilisation in 1936 to escape persecution faced under Stalin.

However, officials visit Agafya every year to check she is okay.

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.

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.