Episode Details

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Ten more anecdotes of the Hodja, from the courts of Timur and Bajazet to the neighbours of the old folk book. A blind poet, once the favourite of the viziers, answers the vizier who visits him with what his boy reads: curses against those who left his father unsupported. Promised anything he wants, Nasreddin asks ten gold pieces and builds a great gate in an open field — a monument the world will laugh at, while Tamerlan's victories draw tears; he saves Bajazet's officers with the offer of a two-man army, himself on the drum; and he corrects the Khan's arithmetic of generosity by one head — his own. Then the folk book takes over: a revenge demanded upon a camel, a whole day and night spent waiting on the evidence of a splashing fountain, a borrowed pan that first bears a young one and then dies, the sauce of the sauce of a hare served to the neighbours of the neighbours — and the Hodja himself, who saws off the branch he sits on, believes the stranger's prophecy, lies down dead, and from his own bier directs the bearers: when I was alive, I always went this way.

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 What the Boy Reads

1:08 The Gate in the Open Field

2:03 You Take the Standard

2:54 One Head Too Few

3:26 Revenge on the Camel

4:27 I Must Finish First

4:58 Your Pan Has Died

5:52 When I Was Alive

7:18 The Sauce of the Sauce

8:18 Where Right Is in the Dark