Albanian woman is dead at 123
By Reuters, 11/10/2003
TIRANA, Albania -- The oldest woman in Albania, and perhaps the world, died Saturday at age 123 and was buried yesterday beside the husband she resented being forced to marry at 14.
Born Aug. 22, 1880, Hava Rexha breathed her last on Saturday in the picturesque central Albanian village of Shushice, where she had spent her life.
Wrapped in a faded shroud that she embroidered for herself when her elderly husband died a few years after World War II, Rexha was buried in the Shushice cemetery. Hundreds of people joined her only surviving daughter, Vule, 80, and 120 other members of her family to pay their respects at a Muslim ceremony that local reporters described as "majestic."
Interviewed a month before her 122d birthday, Rexha said she resented her forced marriage to a man who was "about 60 and married twice before as well."
"I didn't love my husband. He was an old man," said Rexha, who had six children, four of whom died in childhood. Rexha had carried out household chores and tough farming jobs, including pasturing livestock. A devout Muslim who never touched alcohol, she smoked instead, drank coffee, and enjoyed butter.
News reports said that National Commercial Bank had been giving Rexha $100 a month to help her grandson's family look after her and that the bank had begun action to register her with the Guinness Book of World Records. If Guinness had received and authenticated her documents, she would have entered the records book as the oldest person who ever lived, beating Jeanne-Louise Calment, a Frenchwoman who died in August 1997 at age 122 years and 164 days.
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