Archive · 2022 · From the print edition of Saturday 14 May 2022, Vol. 30, No. 9,132
FeaturesThe hermit who will not be filmed
Above the Kara-Suu canyon, on the tribal side of the line, an old monk receives anyone who climbs to him on foot. He takes no money and turns away cameras.
KARA-SUU — The path to the cell of Rabban Yawsep Orozbai uulu leaves the canyon road about an hour's walk south of the Qara-Chik checkpoint and climbs for another hour through juniper to a ledge where the cathedral's codices were hidden in the 1930s. The hermit of Kara-Suu has lived there alone since 2004. On the Saturday this reporter climbed, there were nineteen people waiting on the ledge: herders, two families from Talas, a young couple from Nurzhan, an elderly Muslim shepherd and a man in a suit.
Rabban Yawsep, 72, was a veterinary assistant in the Soviet period and joined the Order of St. Janyl the Hermit in 1993. He receives anyone who comes on foot, blesses people and horses, listens and gives advice, and takes no money. He refuses to be filmed. A television crew that climbed to him in 2019 was sent back down with its camera unopened and a blessing.
His sayings travel. They circulate as stickers on the Tulpar app, and some are quoted in Talas as far as the Mejlis. The best known is the advice he is said to have given to a DPI deputy who climbed to see him: "Go back down and pay your drivers." The eparchy finds him awkward. He blesses pilgrims of the old faith and Muslim herders alike, and the Order protects him.
He agreed to speak to this newspaper on condition that nothing he said about anyone else was printed. Of himself he said little. "People climb because the city is loud," he said. "Up here it is quiet. That is all I give them. The quiet was here before me."