AGE OLD PROBLEMS
World’s ‘oldest and most miserable’ human, 129, curses Allah for letting her live so long
Koku Istambulova, 129, said: 'Why did Allah give me such a long life and so little happiness?'
A WOMAN who is believed to be the oldest and 'most miserable' human in the world has cursed Allah for giving her a long life.
Koku Istambulova, 129, has lived through two world wars, the Russian civil war after the Bolshevik revolution, and two Chechen wars.
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According to her Russian passport, her date of birth is given as June 1, 1889, but officials say originals of Koku’s documents were lost during the wars which ravaged her homeland in the early part of this century and there is no way to prove her exceptional age.
However, the 129-year-old has cursed Allah for giving her a long life with little happiness, and has previously said she has not had a single happy day in her life.
She asked: "It was God’s will. Why did Allah give me such a long life and so little happiness? I would have been dead long ago, if not for Allah who was holding me in his arms.”
Koku said: “It is hard to live when all who remembered you died long ago. And it is very scary to die, however old you are."
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If her age is correct, Koku was 54 at the time, having earlier lived through the coronation of the last tsar Nicholas II two days before her 7th birthday - and his toppling when she was 27.
Now, in lucid and deeply shocking testimony, she has spoken of the day her native Chechen people were deported by Stalin to the steppes of Kazakhstan almost 75 years ago.
She told how people died in the cattle-truck trains - and their bodies were thrown out of the carriages to be eaten by hungry dogs.
“It was a bad day, cold and gloomy,” she said of the February morning in 1944 when the entire entire nation was banished from their mountain homeland in the Trans-Causacus.
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She said: “We were put in a train and taken, no one knew where. Railway carriages were stuffed with people - dirt, rubbish, excrement was everywhere.”
Young Caucasus girls died from rupturing their bladders as they were ashamed to go to the toilet in crowded stinking the crowded trains, yet there was worse to come.
“On the way to our exile, dead bodies were just thrown out of the train,” she said.
“Nobody was allowed to bury the dead. Corpses were eaten by dogs. My father-in-law was thrown out of the train in this way.”
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The paranoid Stalin alleged the Chechens were collaborating with the Nazis and they were told they were "bad people" and that's why they had to leave, Koku says.
“I don't know what we suffered for… I felt no guilt," she said.
Koku suffered devastating personal bereavements in her Kazakh hell - her two sons both perished in the harsh conditions, as "there were no doctors, no-one to treat them,” she said.
“When women gave birth children often died because there were no obstetricians, only neighbours and friends.”
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Weeping the old lady said: “I only kept my daughter Tamara.”
Exile in Kazakhstan was 13 years - then, after Stalin’s death, people were allowed to return to their homeland.
When she got back, many houses had been grabbed by incoming Russians - so she set to work building her own home, complaining her husband was "too lazy" for the work.
Previously, Koku has been quoted saying that she is the oldest person who ever lived - yet she has not had a single happy day in her life.
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Now she admits: “You're asking if I had a single happy day in my life. It was the day when I first entered my house.
"It was very small and I stoked the stove with wood, but it was my home. I built it myself, the best house in the world. I lived there for 60 years."
As a child she remembers playing with dolls made of cloth by her uncle and had red shoes and white stockings bought by her father ate a fair, but these were the first and last nice clothes in her short youth.
She said: “Father was ill, then mother was ill. Grandma was ill. I was the oldest, how could I leave them?”
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She married late when a man was chosen for her from another village, and while she didn't know him at all in the beginning, she grew to love him.
“What else could I do if I got married? I had to endure. His name was Magomed and he was younger than me... He wasn't handsome at all," she laughs.
The state pension fund, a state body, claims there are 37 people over 110 years of age in Russia yet all these claims, including Koku’s, are impossible to verify because of the lack of reliable birth or early childhood written records.
The oldest documented human lifespan is Jeanne Calment, from France, who lived 122 years, 164 days, dying in 1997.
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