Episode Details

Seventeen more anecdotes of the Hodja. At a wedding feast his old clothes earn him no honour at all, so he fetches his fur coat, is seated at the head of the table, and holds out its sleeves to be fed: it is the coat that is being honoured, why should it not also have the enjoyment? A hungry guest in a feasting town wishes that every day were Bairam; a man climbs up to sit between his ox's wide horns, and is thrown off for his curiosity; an empty soup bowl is carried out to guests as the soup that butter and rice would have made; ten geese go out to graze and nine come home, and the tenth man is told he should have taken one while there were any; a flute is promised to the one boy who paid for it; a thread tied to a toe — and a cat's paw upon it — stops a famous appetite in mid-feast; a sleeping guest wakes to find he has already eaten, for his moustache is wet with yoghurt; and Tamerlan, weeping at his own face in the barber's mirror, asks why the Hodja weeps on longer than he: "You saw yourself only once. I see you all day."

From Der Hodscha Nasreddin by Albert Wesselski (1911), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering.

KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.

Chapters:

0:00 Opening

0:05 Feed My Coat

0:48 Every Day Bairam

1:29 Between the Horns

2:15 Whoever Has Eaten

2:46 If We Had Butter and Rice

3:27 Her Father Loved Soup

4:17 The Thief Will Come to the Spring

4:44 You Should Have Taken One

5:44 The One Who Paid

6:19 Did Anyone Invite Him?

6:35 A Dog for the Soup

7:20 Not the Tearful Genre

7:43 The Sheep's Head

8:27 The Hand Is Far Away

9:26 My Amad Pulls the Thread

10:15 You Have Eaten in Your Sleep

11:20 I See You All Day