The oldest woman in Albania + and perhaps the world + died on Saturday at the age of 123 and was buried on Sunday beside the husband she resented being forced to marry at 14.

Born on August 22, 1880, Hava Rexha breathed her last on Saturday in the picturesque central Albanian village of Shushice, where she had spent her whole life.

Wrapped in a faded shroud which she embroidered for herself when her elderly husband died a few years after World War Two, Rexha was buried in the wooded Shushice cemetery.

Hundreds of people, who saw her as an icon of longevity, joined her only surviving daughter, Vule, 80, and 120 other members of her family to pay their last respects at a Muslim ceremony local reporters described as "majestic".

Interviewed by Reuters a month before her 122nd birthday, Rexha still resented her forced marriage at 14 to a man who was "about 60 and married twice before as well". "I did not want a wedding. I didn't love my husband. He was an old man," said Rexha, who had six children, four of whom died in childhood.

Rexha spent her life carrying out tough farming jobs and household chores + pasturing livestock, raising children and never taking a break. A devout Muslim who never touched alcohol, she smoked instead, drank coffee and liked butter.

Press reports said the National Commercial Bank had been giving Rexha a pension of US$100 a month to help her grandson's needy family to look after her, and that the bank had begun action to register her with the Guinness Book of Records.

If Guinness Book officials had received and authenticated her documents, she would have entered the records book as the oldest person who ever lived, beating Frenchwoman Jeanne-Louise Calment who died in August 1997 aged 122 years and 164 days.

Her age was stated on a family certificate issued by the country's communist authorities in 1946.

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