Account 01 · A personal memory
A Name I Remember from Childhood
I have remembered the word “Nohrikha” since I was about five years old. It came up often in our family, especially when my grandfather was speaking.
“We should go and ask Granny Nohrikha,” he would say when someone was ill, needed treatment, or had a question no one could answer. Sometimes he sounded serious; sometimes there was a touch of humour: “Oh, go and ask Granny Nohrikha,” or “We'd better ask Granny Nohrikha about that.”
I never took these words to mean that anyone actually intended to visit her. In our family conversations, Granny Nohrikha seemed more like a person to turn to when every other answer had run out. Still, I always wondered: who was she?
When I asked my relatives, I found that they remembered the expression but could not explain where it came from. Even my grandparents' children did not know who Nohrikha was or how my grandfather had learned her name. No one had thought to ask him while there was still time. It was simply something he used to say.
My grandfather was born in 1939 to a family of Volga Germans. In 1941 his family was deported and ended up in the Urals, near Krasnoturyinsk. I spent years researching this branch of our family, whose surname appears as Heinz in different spellings. Some relatives also had connections with Kazakhstan, but I could never work out how Nohrikha's name had entered my grandfather's vocabulary.
Around 2005, I tried searching for the word online for the first time. To my surprise, the search engines found absolutely nothing. No stories, no explanation, no mention of a woman with that nickname.
From time to time, I searched again. Later I checked the search-query statistics available through Yandex and Google. They did not show me anyone else searching for “Nohrikha” either. This does not prove that no one had ever spoken or searched for the word, of course. But it felt extraordinary: a name I had heard since childhood seemed not to exist outside our family.
How many words can you think of that simply do not exist on the internet? I couldn't think of one. Now you know one too — “Nohrikha.”
Around 2021, that changed. During another search I found Psovaya okhota (Псовая охота), a dramatic work by Zhanna Drozdovskaya, published in 2016. One of its characters mentioned Granny Nohrikha in connection with a treatment. Both the unusual name and the context were strikingly similar to what I had heard from my grandfather.
I wanted to contact the author. I left a message on the literary website in 2021 and later tried social media, but for years nothing came of it. Only in August 2026 did I find a working email address and receive a reply from Zhanna Drozdovskaya.
Her letter changed the story. In Zhanna's family, Granny Nohrikha was remembered as a real woman. “Nohrikha” was a nickname derived from her surname, Nokhrina; no one knew her given name. According to Zhanna's relatives, she assisted women in childbirth, lived in Kazakhstan, travelled with their family to China and eventually returned with them.
So the word I had carried since childhood was connected to a real person's life. Much remains unknown: her given name, the years of her life, and how my grandfather heard about her. Perhaps he never met her at all and learned about her through another relative.
That is why this website exists. I want to preserve what our families still remember and make it possible for others to share their own memories of “Granny Nohrikha.”
Account 02 · Zhanna Drozdovskaya
Nohrikha in the Memories of Zhanna Drozdovskaya's Family
This account is based on letters from Zhanna Drozdovskaya dated 31 August and 18 September 2026. Zhanna recounts memories passed down by her mother and other relatives who knew Granny Nohrikha. It is a family testimony, not a biography established through documentary records.
Zhanna Drozdovskaya's mother was born in China in 1942. Before her birth, the family had endured dispossession, hunger, and hardship connected with the construction of the Turkestan–Siberian Railway, known as the Turksib. Zhanna writes that her ancestors were trying to escape these hardships and save their loved ones. Not everyone in the older generation survived. She mentions her great-grandmother, whose surname was Kurtukova, and her grandfather Pavel Chernov.
Before leaving for China, the family had lived in Kazakhstan. Nearby, in the village of Bolshaya Bukon in the Kokpekty district of the Semipalatinsk region, lived a woman with the surname Nokhrina. Everyone called her Granny Nohrikha. According to Zhanna, no one knew her given name.
The family travelled to China together with Nohrikha. Zhanna's mother was born there, followed by her brothers and sisters. It was through her mother's stories that Zhanna learned what an extraordinary woman Granny Nohrikha had been.
People in the area knew Nohrikha as someone they could call upon during childbirth. She was often away from home, travelling to nomadic settlements where babies were due to be born. She spoke Uyghur and Kazakh fluently and could communicate with the people among whom she lived and worked.
Zhanna's mother remembered that none of the mothers or babies attended by Nohrikha had died during childbirth. This is a memory passed down in the family, not a verified medical record. Another detail remained especially vivid: for her work, Nohrikha relied on very little — her hands, water and soap. The family remembered her wisdom and remarkable calm.
According to these same accounts, Nohrikha could neither read nor write, not even sign her name. Yet she reportedly passed an examination in midwifery, worked officially in the profession, and taught others who came to learn from her. Whether records of this work still exist is unknown.
Zhanna also tells of another woman who knew Nohrikha well: Irina Petrovna Ostrovnaya. In China, Irina Petrovna set up a school for Russian children, found paper, sewed notebooks together, and helped the children learn. Family memories suggest that she and Nohrikha were roughly the same age. To protect her daughter, Irina Petrovna arranged for her to go to Australia; she herself later returned to Kazakhstan and lived in Semipalatinsk. Perhaps memories or records from her family may one day provide another lead.
The family and Nohrikha apparently returned from China to Kazakhstan together around 1954. They then went their separate ways. Zhanna's relatives settled in Beskaragay, in the Lebyazhye district of the Pavlodar region. Nohrikha, as far as Zhanna could establish from family stories, remained in her home village of Bolshaya Bukon. By then, she was considered an elderly woman, although her exact age is not known.
The family remained in the Pavlodar region until the mid-to-late 1970s. Most of the relatives then moved to Latvia.
Many years later, Zhanna Drozdovskaya mentioned Granny Nohrikha in her play Psovaya okhota (Псовая охота), published in 2016. Thanks to that work, a name remembered around family tables also found its way onto a page that other people could discover.
In her letter, Zhanna described her as a midwife with golden hands and a kind heart. Those words perhaps best convey how she was remembered by the people whose lives she touched.