A woman claiming to be the oldest person in the world says she's only had a single happy day in her long life.

Koku Istambulova is 129 according to her Russian passport.

When asked the secret to her longevity, she told The Sun 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."

She went on to say it's "hard to live when all who remembered you died long ago".

Ms Istambulova told the paper about life in pre-revolution Russia, how her native Chechen people were driven out of their homeland by Stalin, the difficulty of giving birth when there were no doctors, and how she had to build her own house after Russians took hers and her ugly husband was "too lazy" to do it.

"You're asking if I had a single happy day in my life. It was the day when I first entered my house," she said.

Because her records were lost during the Second Chechen War earlier this century, she has no way of proving she was born in 1889, as her current passport claims.

It's not the first time she's complained about her longevity - Ms Istambulova made similar remarks last year.



The confirmed world's longest-living person on record was Frenchwomen Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 aged 122.

Newshub.