Modern Methuselah

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 77, Issue 154, 2 July 1934, Page 7

Modern Methuselah

WORLD’S OLDEST MAN DEATH OF ZARA AGHA (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, June 29. Istanbul reports the death of Zara Agha, the world’s oldest man. Agha, who was convinced that be was 160, commenced to decline when a .cccnt medical report, involving an Xray of his bones after an examination or an internal complaint, stated that uc was only P2O. His birth certificate (asserts that he was born in Turkish Ixurdcstan in 1774. He flourished it in front of the unbelievers with the uno scorn as when he declared that i.e had never felt younger when Dr. Voronoff recently offered to rejuvenate him. VALUE OF THE BODY LONDON, June 29. The Daily Mail’s Istanbul correspondent states that tho first relative to visit Agha’s body was his sixty-fivc-year-old youngest daughter. When asked to ’consent to the holding of a post mortem examination in the interests of science she demanded the body for Moslem burial, whereupon the authorities telegraphed the Government seeking permission to hand the body over to the doctors. Meanwhile several cables have been received from America offering high prices for the body. Although Agha claimed to be IGO vears old, doctors estimate that he was from HO to 145 years old Agha claimed that he had been married fourteen times. He remembered at least 36 children. Zara Agha, the modern “Methuselah, ’ ’ was imported into the United States by the “Drys” to ‘convert the “Wets” to water and long life. He was reputed to be 160 years old, and being a faithful Moslem, claimed that he had never tasted a drop of alcohol in all that century and a-half. Ho was a Kurd, was born in a village in the Caucasin Mountains, and placed his birthday in 1770, nine years -—if correct —before Britain lost its American colonies, now the United States, who declared their independence in 1779. This Kurdish Methuselah, so the Turkish aiYhives confirmed, had been married fourteen times, and only with one wife at a time. He was alleged to have sixty-five children. At the age of 35, so his story went, he was a sergeant in the army qf Napoleon in Egypt, having volunteered. Ho said that ho had a vivid recollection of the great Corsican, as he saw him in Egypt one hundred and twentylive years ago. With the evacuation of Egypt by Napoleon, Zara Agha landed on tho Island of Corfu with some of the troops. After several years he drifted back to Turkey, and for a while he was “executioner’’ for Ali Pasha. As infantry sergeant, he fought with the Turks in the war of the Greeks for independence-. At the .age of sixty, just one hundred pears ago —that is, in 1830, he found himseix again in Constantinople. Hunger forced him to become a “hamal,” a porter, or carrier of heavy loads, just as one sees in Oriental harbours to this day. He advanced to be “Chief Hamal,” or what would now be “Bos* of the union.” More years glided by. One wife after the other died. Generations passed. Zara lived on. For wives, he always took girls between the age of fourteen and twenty-two, never older. In the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. Zara Agha, then one hundred and twenty-seven years old, was accepted as a volunteer. His thirteenth wife, proving unfaithful while he was being exhibited in Paris, ho divorced her upon h : s return to Constantinople. In 1921. then 151 years old, the Kurdish Methuselah took unto himself his fourteenth wife, a girl of fifteen, who presented him with his sixty-fifth child. Such was the tale of Zara Agha. There were blank spaces in his memory. Tn Constantinople he was a local sensation for tourists for some years.