0
0
A woman who claims to be the oldest person in the world has told of the one happy day in her life.
According to her Russian passport Koku Istambulova is 129-years-old, her birthday on 1 June 1889 making her the oldest living person by more than six years.
Many official documents were destroyed in the wars that ravaged her native Chechnya, meaning her age is impossible to verify.
If she is truly 129, then Koku lived through the toppling of Tsar Nicholas II in 1918 and was 54 when her native Chechen people were deported en masse by Stalin to the steppes of Kazakhstan almost 75 years ago.
“It was a bad day, cold and gloomy,” she said of the February morning in 1944 when the entire nation was banished from their mountain homeland in the Trans-Causacus.
“We were put in a train and taken … no one knew where.
“Railway carriages were stuffed with people - dirt, rubbish, excrement was everywhere.”