Moved from the big city to the countryside and stayed there - personal stories

Have you ever had the thought, “How much you would like to live a quiet, measured country life”? And there are people who have not only thought about this topic, but also realized such a desire in reality. These were our heroes, we found out how they decided to move and how their life has changed.

Table of Contents

It all started with a chance meeting

villager

“I made the decision to move after I realized that life was passing me by.

Five years ago I changed my life abruptly by moving from Ulyanovsk to a remote village in Perm Krai. Before the change of residence, I had been working as a hairdresser for several years, and everything seemed to suit me. But one day an unusual acquaintance turned my life upside down.

I began to go to the temple and pray for the creation of a family. A few months later I met a guy from the Perm region, at that time I did not know that he would become my future husband. Distance was not a hindrance. For 1.5 years of virtual communication only a few times we met, and then played a wedding in Ulyanovsk and immediately left to master life in the village.

Before that, he bought a half-abandoned house and began to develop the territory, where he lived for a year completely alone, recording his activities in a video blog. After the move, I was homesick, just missing familiar faces for two years, then I made new friends. Frequent conversations with my mom on the phone helped me cope.

In the village you learn the essence of yourself, you become simpler – these moments, perhaps, the main plus from the change of residence.

And if we talk about what made me stay, I was simply enchanted by the Russian oven – food from it and sleeping on it are extraordinary.

Over time we have built up a small farmstead. We make homemade soap, and from goat and cow milk we make natural cheese, which is popular in the neighborhood. The main feature of our cheese is the use of our own sourdough starter, which goes from cheese to cheese and gives a unique flavor.

In five years our family has grown to five people, in the near future we hope to build a roomy house. My dream is to have a workshop for creative activities and to grow a garden with fruit trees.

The desire to live closer to nature

My husband and I lived in Volgograd with our four children. We worked, on weekends we either visited shopping centers or went for walks, went to the nature. There was a small forest near our house, but in 2018 it was cut down, and new buildings began to appear en masse, and our windows just overlooked them. It made us very sad.

villager

“As we got older, we started to think more and more about moving. For the last few years we have only lived with thoughts of moving.

And so we bought land in a village in the Abinsky district, began to come there on vacation and little by little to build: poured the foundation, conducted light and water. For two years we built a house, now we live and gradually we are improving it. We were not afraid of any hardships, we finally left in May 2021.

The rhythm of life in the village was unusual for me. It took me a long time to get used to the fact that I could not run anywhere and walk slowly. The mentality of the locals was also different, and I had to adjust to their way of life. From the domestic difficulties we encountered less fast internet and power outages.

During 2.5 years in the village we learned to see the living world around us.

We began to enjoy every day and notice everything beautiful. Independence from urban circumstances was a huge plus. For example, during covid. Children are happy here, they can walk freely. People are much simpler in terms of communication and friendship, there is less selfishness and malice in them.

Also in the village there is less temptation to spend in the store for unnecessary goods, there is cleaner water and air, healthy food – we have our own vegetables, fruits, meat and eggs. We sit on our phones less, we are constantly outdoors. Before we moved here we had health problems, but here they are gone.

We are constantly working in the vegetable garden and in the house, selling our produce, keeping chickens and goats, raising fish in the pond, so the days fly by. We started to spend more time with our children, eventually we settled here, and friends and hobbies appeared. Now we realize that we can no longer return to the city and sit in a cramped apartment.

Moving to the family estate has become a goal.

owner of the family estate “Slavnoe”.

“The decision to live in nature was probably born with me.

And although I was almost one hundred percent city dweller until my graduation from university, I never seriously prepared to live further in the city. I thought I would become a translator, travel a lot and live wherever I liked, but definitely closer to the sea. All these were, so to speak, preliminary rosy dreams.

When I was still at university I got acquainted with V. Megre’s books from the series “Ringing Cedars of Russia”, in 2000 the book “Creation” was published in this series, where for the first time the idea about family estates was voiced. Since then my life vector has changed: I will live only in my own family estate.

Since this is a very global goal, it had to be broken down into several stages:

searching for a place, for this purpose my friend and I hitchhiked across the country;
traveling to the nearest village to the chosen location;
meeting a man who fully shares my thoughts and goals, and registering the marriage;
decorating the chosen plot of land;
building the house and actually moving into the estate.

All this took about five years. I was afraid that I would not be able to easily fit into the village life, but surprisingly I got used to stoking the stove and carrying water very quickly, and did not suffer much from the amenities outside. With a vegetable garden turned out far from immediately, but you can slowly learn or do not do it at all, to turn the plot into a beautiful place for recreation with a lawn and flowers.

We also had normal relations with the locals – not without nuances, of course, but in general it was always possible to ask for help or ask something. Like-minded people helped, there was a healthy interesting communication with them. I was able to find a job as a tutor, and later I got a job at a school.

The hardest part was psychological: I moved to the Far East from the Urals, and all my family and friends stayed there. Sometimes I wanted to drop everything and leave, but I was stopped by the place I saw as my estate. It really got into my heart and helped me to hold on until I met my future husband. And yet, there are still times when I feel a little sad.

During the first phase in the village, which lasted five years, my husband and I learned a lot. We had almost no means, so we had to work a lot with our heads and hands, remake old things, originalize with repairs, planting. It was a very good period of formation and preparation for the estate, a kind of training ground. I think we went through it successfully, becoming much more confident and independent people than we were in the city. We learned to better understand ourselves, our true desires and feelings of other people, from practice – we mastered farming, beekeeping, even kept a horse.

When we moved to the estate at the end of 2010, we plunged into a completely different flow. We live on the edge of the forest, in the wild taiga. Such a life, largely built on natural rhythms, requires not only good physical shape, but also spiritual strength, a core.

We built the first small house, began to settle the land – at first only 30 hectares out of our 4 hectares. In 2013, our first daughter was born here, we expanded the house in parallel, learned to be parents, experienced the strongest mental overload with unorganized life, minimal electricity, it was probably the most difficult years here. In 2016 our second daughter was born, by that time we had already established a relatively comfortable life, it became easier. We learned not to cling to people and rely only on our own strength. Three more years later, a son was born.

When the rhythm and structure of the day has already been adjusted, there is a lot of free time that can be devoted to anything. We are never bored – there are family and household chores, educational activities. There is time to watch movies, read, create, go for walks and engage in professional income-generating activities. For example, we have mastered the production of raw cedar oil, which is quite profitable. For a long time I have been running author projects on the Internet, created a website, writing novels and blogging – although now I’m on a break from writing, but the time will come and I’ll get back into it.

The most important plus is finding self-sufficiency. In the city, people live, drive and work in boxes. Nature for them is only a rare background for weekends, it often scares modern man, it seems wild, dangerous, incomprehensible.

But life here, despite its apparent simplicity, is actually a way to ourselves. We become happier, calmer, children grow up among natural beauty, in love, peace and joy.

This place has become home to our children and us, there has never been a question of leaving here. We have dedicated our lives to finding and improving a piece of paradise on earth. And despite all the trials, we have already put our roots firmly into this land, we feel good here. We have grown to love our lives, become stronger, more cautious, perhaps a little wiser.

Look for a comfortable place to live, it can be an apartment in the city or a house in the countryside, the main thing is that you and your family should enjoy living there.