The "oldest" woman in the world, 129, reveals that there is only one "happy day" in her long life, that she claims to be God's punishment

A woman claiming to be the oldest person in the world told the happy day of her life.

According to his Russian passport, Koku Istambulova is 129 years old. His birthday is June 1, 1889, making him the oldest living person of more than six years.

Many official documents were destroyed during the wars that devastated his native Chechnya, which means that his age is impossible to verify.

If she is really 129 years old, then Koku experienced the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in 1918 and was 54 years old when his 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 about the morning of February 1944, when the entire nation was banned from their mountain country in the Trans-Causacus.

"We were put on a train and taken away … nobody knew where.

"The railway cars were full of people – dirt, garbage, dung were everywhere."

In his speech in Chechen native, Koku reminded Caucasian girls to be dead when their bladder was torn because they were too embarrassed to go to the toilets in the cluttered and stinking trains.

Koku added: "On the way to our exile, corpses were thrown off the train.

"Nobody was allowed to bury the dead.

"The corpses were eaten by dogs.

"My father-in-law was ejected from the train that way."

Earlier this year, Koku stated that she had never lived a happy day in her life and that she was alive only by God's grace.

While she again spoke of great difficulties during the Soviet regime, Koku remembered a time when things seemed a little better.

After the death of Stalin, the 13 years of exile of the Chechens ended, leaving most of them to return home to discover that their homes had been taken by Russians.

Undaunted and without the help of her "lazy" husband, Koku set out to build a place to live.

She said, "You ask me if I had a single happy day in my life.

"It was the day I entered my home for the first time.

"It was very small and I fanned the stove with wood.

"But it was at my place.

"I built it myself, the best house in the world.

"I lived there for 60 years."

The great granddaughter of Koku, Medina, 15, now looks after the elderly woman.

She said Koku felt the loss of her daughter Tamara, a mother of six, and a 16-year-old grandmother, who died several years ago.

"After his death, Koku became almost blind," Medina said.

"She's barely walking now. And when she remembers her daughter, my own grandmother, she worries.

"She cries several times a day while she remembers her daughter."

Things were very different for Koku when she was growing up.

She claims to have never been to school but to take care of animals, cultivate the family garden and take care of her sick relatives.

She said, "The father was sick, and then the mother was sick. Grandma was sick.

"I was the eldest, how can I leave them?"

As for romance, Koku married a young man named Magomed, who was chosen for her in another village.

"I did not know him at all," she says.

"But then I started to like it.

"What can I do if I get married?

"I had to endure.

"It was not beautiful at all."

Previously questioned about the secret of his long life, Koku asserted that it was "the will of God" and that "a long life is not at all a gift of God for me – but a punishment" .

She asked, "Why did Allah give me such a long life and so little happiness?"

"I would have been dead a long time ago, if it was not for Allah who was holding me in his arms.

"It's hard to live when everyone who has remembered you is dead long ago.

"And it's very scary to die, no matter what your age."

Officials said Koku's original documents had been lost in the wars that devastated his country at the turn of the century.

This means that there is no way to prove his exceptional age.

But in Chechnya, no one doubts its longevity.

The public pension fund, a public body, says that there are 37 people over 110 years old in Russia. However, all these requests, including Koku's, are impossible to verify due to the lack of reliable birth or early childhood data.

Most live, like Koku, in the Caucasus, where people have been living for a long time.

The oldest documented human lifetime is Jeanne Calment, of France, who lived 122 years, 164 days, dying in 1997.

As a girl, she met Vincent van Gogh.