Entertainment

Yes Theory traveled to Old Believer Nikolai on remote Alaska peninsula

A resident threatened to shoot down their drone before they flew a post office worker to a glacier she had never seen.

Yes Theory traveled to Nikolai and the smaller village of Vnasena on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, where Old Believer families have kept Russian language and Orthodox customs in villages reachable only by dirt road.

Old Believers broke from the Russian Orthodox Church more than three centuries ago over liturgical changes they rejected as false teaching. Persecution and Soviet repression after the 1917 revolution drove many into exile; five families bought remote Kenai land in 1968 and built Nikolai from scratch.

The group arrived with almost no contacts after hearing about the community secondhand. Private property warnings lined the roads into Vnasena, population about 300, and the crew heard gunshots as they drove in.

They stopped to speak with a boy in traditional dress who said his family belonged to the Old Believer community, spoke Russian at home, and that he was born in the United States.

In Nikolai a man told them his grandfather fled the revolution and built the handmade house he still owned in 1976. At the post office, a clerk who moved north in 1969 said she had worked there more than 30 years and raised four children in town.

While filming near a house, a man walked up with a revolver and demanded they land a drone, saying he would shoot it out of the sky if they refused. They brought the drone down at once.

Nina Constantina welcomed them at her cafe and served borscht while steering the filming herself. Yes Theory chartered a single-engine floatplane and took the post office clerk to a glacier lake she had never visited in nearly six decades in the area. She led a prayer beside the water after the landing.

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