World’s oldest woman finds a happy moment

A woman who claims to be the oldest person in the world has told of the brutality of her deportation into Soviet internal exile by tyrant Stalin during World War Two. Koku Istambulova is 129 according to her Russian passport and pension papers which show her date of birth as 1 June 1889.

Now in a lucid and deeply shocking testimony, she has spoken emotionally of the appalling day her native Chechen people were deported en masse by Stalin to the steppes of Kazakhstan almost 75 years ago and says the only happy day in all her years was when she entered a home built from her own hands back in her native land. 

Upon returning home from the shocking Stalin purge that sentenced her to 13 years in a foreign land, Koku set about building a home after Russians occupied many of the vacated Chechen houses. 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. However, despite trawling through dirt to craft her home from mud, water, and dry sticks, Koku has now said the day she got back and the eventual building of her home - ‘the most beautiful in the world’ - were happy days.   

The wily old woman knows people’s fascination with her, she said to TV crews interviewing her for a documentary on the Chechen purge: “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.’ Her great-granddaughter Medina, 15, now chosen by the family to care for the remarkable Koku, said: “Granny built it herself when she returned from exile. “She mixed soil and water, added dry sticks and grass and made stones out of it, then put them one on another and painted with white paint later.’    However, this was preceded by truly dark days, Koku told how people died in the cattle-truck trains used for the forced exile of her people - and their bodies were thrown out of the carriages to be eaten by hungry dogs.

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. “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-Caucasus. “We were put in a train and taken … no one knew where.

“Railway carriages were stuffed with people - dirt, rubbish, excrement was everywhere.’ Stressing the cruelty of Stalin’s action, she said determinedly in her native Chechen language: “Write that - there was excrement in the carriages. “We were not allowed [to go] anywhere.’ Young Caucasus girls died because from the rupturing of their bladders - they were ashamed to go to the toilet in crowded stinking the crowded trains.

Older women tried to crowd around them to stop their embarrassment as they relieved themselves. Yet there was worse. “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.