Soon it will be 41 years since Yuri Gagarins death, and disputes and theories about the circumstances of his death still continue. This piece tells of secret meetings between the first cosmonaut and nun Makaria, who said she warned Gagarin not to fly again, and of the unusual and hard fate of the elder herself. The story joins little known episodes from Gagarins life and the spiritual path of a woman people from all around came to for comfort and healing.

In a few days, it will be 41 years since the death of Earth’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin. Information about how the first man to travel into space died is ambiguous and contradictory; for many decades, numerous speculations and versions have stirred people’s minds.
However, far from everyone knows that Gagarin knew he would not live to see gray hair.
On the eve of his death, Yuri Gagarin secretly came to the nun Makaria — a holy elder who lived near his native town of Gzhatsk (now the city of Gagarin).
Gagarin’s mother, Anna Timofeevna, also came to the schema-nun. She was a simple woman of faith. She felt so light and good after conversations with the elder that she asked her son to come as well.
Yuri visited the elder more than once; the last time was a month before his death. The elder herself told about the first cosmonaut’s visits:
“Gagarin came, and more than once, he came to me as to a sick person... In 1968, three cars came: two with doctors and the third one with Gagarin. He usually came in and said, ‘I’ll sit here, let the doctors talk with you...’. He was a simple, good man, a very good man. Simple as a child. I then told him: ‘Don’t fly anymore, you mustn’t fly!’ He did not listen to me, and then death overtook him soon after.”
After learning of the cosmonaut’s death, Makaria asked the priest who had come to see her to perform a posthumous funeral service for the deceased Yuri Gagarin in her home.
The elder herself was a very interesting person with a difficult fate. The saint was born on June 11, 1926, in the village of Karpovo in Smolensk Province. The frail girl from birth was baptized the very next day with the name Feodosia. Her twin brother did not survive.
By that time, more than 20 people were already living under one roof in the Artemyev family. Feodosia, the youngest of all, and with sick legs besides, was completely neglected, slept on the floor, and ate whatever she could get. At the age of eight, the girl fell into a lethargic sleep and woke up only 14 days later. The doctors could not understand what had happened, and so for the entire two weeks the child’s body lay in the hospital morgue. And her soul, as Feodosia herself later said, traveled in heaven. The girl described how she cried and asked the Queen of Heaven to heal her sick legs or leave her in paradise, but the Lady of Heaven replied that she would be needed on earth. Returning to earth, the girl received the gift of healing.
During the Great Patriotic War, the family scattered, leaving the sick Feodosia alone to die in the deserted house. The elder recalled: "I was little then, I would crawl under the shed or bury myself in hay. I suffered, crawled alone in the frost, there was no one nearby. I sat in both water and cold. In the snow I would dig a little hole, curl up in a ball, put my hand under my face, and sleep like that. Everything on me had rotted away, my body was hardened. I drank dirty water, ate snow: I’d grab a little clean snow in my hand and put it in my mouth. And if someone gave me bread, it would freeze, you couldn’t bite it. And in summer I ate grass, flowers".
In 1943, a woman from the village of Temkino took the girl in to live with her. In their small house, Feodosia began receiving people, giving them comfort and healing. At the age of 20, Feodosia was tonsured as a nun with the name Tikhona, and on February 1, 1978, Abbot Donat tonsured Nun Tikhona into the schema, giving her a new name — Makaria.
Later, Makaria bought an unfinished house on the outskirts of the village, and two women agreed to live with the nun and help her. She received people from early morning until late at night. And at night she almost never slept — she prayed.
It was at this time that the elder first met the cosmonaut’s mother, and then him himself.
On June 18, 1993, at half past eleven at night, schema-nun Makaria peacefully passed away in her bed. Makaria’s last words were: "Fast, pray, in this is salvation..."