The Hodja's Wit — A Gölcük (Kocaeli) Folk Tale

ℹ️ This is an English translation of a Turkish oral folk tale. Read the Turkish original here: Hocanın Aklı — Gölcük (Kocaeli) Masalı.

This tale was collected in Nüzhetiye (Döşeme), a village in the Gölcük district of Kocaeli, in northwestern Anatolia — a village settled by Georgian refugees who fled the Batumi region after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. It appears in an academic article by Nedim Bakırcı, which applies Carl Jung’s theory of archetypal symbolism, drawing on a master’s thesis by Enis Gökçe.

Once there was, once there wasn’t, in the old days, there lived a poor hodja’s son. While the hodja and his wife were living happily, time passed and the hodja’s son received his discharge from military service and came home. When his mother and father saw their child return home safe and sound, they were overjoyed. The hodja and his wife decided their son had now reached marrying age. The hodja said to his wife, “This boy is old enough to marry now, wife, we must find him a match.” His wife said to the hodja, “You can see how things stand — we have no money to speak of, how are we to marry off this poor boy?” The hodja called his son over to him.

“My son, we have a young bull in the barn — tomorrow take it to the market and sell it there,” he said. Rising early the next morning, the hodja woke his son. Before sending him off to market with the bull, he gave him an important warning: “Listen to me carefully, son — you must have heard of the Seven Yellow Brothers, the gang known throughout these villages. They have every kind of trick, game, and deceit in them. Whatever you do, don’t sell the bull to those yellow brothers,” he said, and sent his son off to market before dawn. After the hodja’s son had gone quite a way, a man appeared before him. The man asked, “Young man, where are you headed?” The hodja’s son said he was taking the bull to market to sell it.

At this the man was astonished and said, “What bull, man — I don’t see any bull around here, this is a donkey!” The young man looked carefully at the man, remembered his father’s words, and — noting that the man was blond — paid him no mind and went on his way. Before he even reached the market, the hodja’s son ran into a few more people. When they gave the very same reaction as the first man, the hodja’s son grew angry and finally chased the last one off. When he reached the animal market, the hodja’s son tied up his bull and set food and water before it. Then he sat down beside the animal he had brought to sell and began waiting for a buyer. As it happened, every single customer who came forward for the bull at the market was blond, and all of them, as if speaking with one mouth, insisted that what was being sold was not a bull at all but a donkey. By evening the matter had grown so confused that even the hodja’s son began to doubt himself. Seeing that things did not look good and that he would be left holding the bull, he changed his mind and decided to sell it to the very next customer at a donkey’s price. And so, to the last blond customer who came along, without any bargaining at all, he sold the bull at the price of a donkey. When the hodja’s son returned home and handed the money to his father, the hodja said, “Well, son, there are five liras here — our bull was worth ten, where is the rest of the five liras?” At this the hodja’s son said to his father, “Father, everyone at the market who wanted the bull was blond. Every one of them kept saying it wasn’t a bull but a donkey, so in the end, seeing I couldn’t sell it otherwise and it would be left on my hands, I sold our bull at the price of a donkey.”

On learning what had happened, the hodja went straight out and bought a donkey. After buying the donkey, he borrowed three gold coins from a friend. He mixed these three gold coins into the donkey’s feed and fed it to the animal. The next day, early in the morning, the hodja set off with the donkey for the village of the yellow brothers and arrived at their door. When the yellow brothers saw the hodja, they were pleased and welcomed him in. They took the donkey from his hand to lead it to the barn, and the hodja followed along behind them. They turned to the hodja and said, “Hodja, you go back and rest at the house, we’ll tie up the donkey in the barn and come.” The hodja would not listen and went into the barn together with them all the way. He asked them for a little feed and water for the donkey and set it down in front of the animal. As they were all coming back out of the barn, the hodja said in an agitated voice, “Shut the doors tight and lock them.” The yellow brothers, growing suspicious, asked the hodja why he wanted this done. The hodja said, “You’ll see when morning comes.” After that they went up to the house, ate a meal, talked a while, and went to sleep.

The next day, after they had their breakfast, the hodja asked the seven brothers for a jug of water and a small basin. The brothers, bringing him what he asked for, waited curiously to see what the hodja would do. The hodja went toward the barn and asked them to open the doors. The seven brothers opened the doors and followed the hodja inside. The hodja went around behind the donkey and rolled up his sleeves. Then he said, “In the name of God!” and began sifting through the donkey’s droppings. The hodja found the first gold coin, then the second, then the third, and after washing the coins and his hands, said, “May God grant abundance,” and walked out of the barn. Seeing this, the seven brothers were left utterly astonished. “Well, hodja, how can this be?” they said. The hodja said, “It is one of God’s mysteries — my donkey drops gold. Now do you understand why I told you to shut the doors tight?” Dumbfounded, the seven brothers began to beg the hodja: “Ask whatever you want of us, hodja, just sell us this donkey,” they pleaded. The hodja, after making them plead and coax a good while, finally sold the donkey to the seven brothers for exactly one hundred gold coins. As he was leaving, the hodja told the seven brothers, “My donkey is very tired, boys — shut the barn doors tight and don’t go near the donkey for a full seven days; give its feed and water in from above the barn.”

The seven brothers, promising to follow his instructions to the letter, let the hodja go, and he set off for another village saying he wanted to buy a good horse. A man appeared in the square and said, “I have a very fine, spirited horse, but I warn you, it’s expensive.” The hodja said, “Let’s go and see it, the price doesn’t matter.” Seeing the horse, the hodja liked it very much. “How much?” he asked the man selling it, and the man said, “I told you, it’s expensive — one gold coin.” The hodja said, “Here, take two gold coins,” and bought the horse, then set off for home. When he arrived, he told his wife everything that had happened and said, “Now, wife, listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you, because these seven brothers will certainly come to demand an account from me. Go to the butcher and get some animal intestines. And from the market get two rabbits and a shepherd’s flute. When the Seven Brothers come to the door, I’ll be out in the field — as soon as they arrive at the door, be sure to have one of the rabbits in your hand. Once they’ve gone, wind the intestines around your throat and cover it with your headscarf so it doesn’t show,” he told her.

A week later the seven brothers went down to the barn and, before opening the door, peered through a crack, and saw something glittering brightly inside. In their excitement they couldn’t get the door open and kept bumping into each other, until at last they got it open — and what did they see but the donkey standing there, stiff as a board, its hooves turned up. The sun striking its hooves had lit up the whole surroundings. Realizing what had happened, the seven brothers could not contain their fury and went straight to the hodja’s door. Just as the hodja had told her, when they came pounding furiously at the door, his wife appeared before them with a rabbit in her hand, and when the seven brothers asked where the hodja was, she told them he was out in the field. When the seven brothers reached the field, the hodja, as though he already knew they were coming, kept his back turned and went on with his work, saying, “Oh, what took you so long? Come, come, I’ve been expecting you. It told me you were coming,” showing them the rabbit in his hand. The seven brothers, at a loss for what to say in their astonishment, asked the hodja, “Hodja, how did you know it was us and that we’d be coming here?” The hodja, showing them what was in his hand, said, “This is like a child to me. I keep in touch with my wife at home through it — it went ahead of you and told me you were coming.” The seven brothers, dumbfounded, forgot why they had even come and began looking at one another.

The hodja said, “Come now, be my guests this evening — just tell me what you’d like to eat and I’ll pass it along, and it’ll go tell my wife, and by the time you arrive everything will be ready.” The bewildered seven brothers told him what they wanted to eat, and the hodja whispered into the rabbit’s ear and let it go, striking it off toward the forest. The seven brothers said, “But hodja, the road is over there — you sent the rabbit off into the forest.” The hodja said, “Should it go by the road and become food for the dogs? It’ll go leaping over hill and mountain — it knows the shortcuts on that road.” Watching the hodja in amazement, the seven brothers, as soon as he finished his work, set off for home.

When they arrived, they found the rabbit sitting in front of the hearth, but the food was not ready. The hodja’s wife said, “Sir, I could not get everything ready in time.” The hodja flew into a rage at once, snatched up a knife, and struck it across his wife’s throat. The wall was streaked with blood from top to bottom and the woman collapsed to the floor. The seven brothers said, “Hodja, what have you done — was it really worth it, over a meal?” The hodja shouted at them not to interfere and went into another room; when he came back in, he had a shepherd’s flute in his hand, and he began to play it over his wife’s head — and then they saw the hodja’s wife’s hands and feet begin to move. All at once she came back to life, rose up, went inside, and set about preparing things. Meanwhile the seven brothers, having entirely forgotten why they had come, began asking the hodja for the flute and the rabbit; this time the hodja did not resist, saying, “Very well — after this hour I’ll have no more use for them anyway, I’ve sold them, that’s that. I don’t ask for much: ten gold coins for the flute, five for the rabbit, that will do.”

That evening, when the seven brothers, who had been out working in the field, went home, they told the rabbit they had gotten from the hodja what they wanted to eat, and let it go. When they got home, they found that what they had asked for was not there — instead, every one of them had cut his own wife’s throat. They went and fetched the flute from inside. One played it — nothing. Another played it — nothing. A third said, “Give it here, you clearly don’t know how to play it,” snatched the flute — nothing. Every one of them tried, all in vain. At last they came to their senses, but this time they decided to execute the hodja.

The seven brothers went to the hodja’s door, bound his hands and feet, and put him in a sack. One of them said, “This hodja has taken our money, our goods, and in the end our wives too — it won’t do to just throw him blindly into the raging stream. Let’s tell the whole village, so that our reputation and standing are upheld, and let everyone see what becomes of the one who swindled the Seven Brothers.” At this the seven brothers left the hodja in the sack and went off to spread the word among the villagers. Inside the sack, the hodja began wailing and crying out, “I don’t want the sultan’s daughter, I don’t want the sultan’s daughter!” A poor village shepherd, drawn by this voice, went toward it and found that the sound was coming from a sack tied to a horse. He went and untied the sack and said to the hodja, “Why are you shouting like that, man?” The hodja said, “They mean to marry me to the sultan’s daughter — I don’t want it, they’re taking me there by force.” Hearing this, the shepherd’s face lit up from ear to ear. “I want it,” he said, and began untying the hodja’s hands and feet; he gave the hodja his sheepskin cloak and his flock, climbed into the sack himself, and the hodja drove the flock off ahead of him and made his way away from there.

The seven brothers, coming to the square together with the villagers, took hold of the sack, and from inside the sack came the voice: “I want the sultan’s daughter, I want the sultan’s daughter.” The seven brothers said, “Look at that, and shameless enough to still want the sultan’s daughter,” and, before the eyes of the whole village, they swung the sack and hurled it into the raging stream. Toward evening, as the seven brothers sat in the square, they saw in the distance a shepherd and a flock approaching them. As the shepherd drew nearer, they realized it was the hodja, and their mouths fell open; all together they asked the hodja, “How can this be — how did you survive?” The hodja said, “Ah, if only you’d thrown me a little further out — there’s no end of sheep down at the bottom of that stream.” Astonished, the seven brothers said, “How can that be, how is such a thing possible,” but their curiosity got the better of them. One of them said, “Let me go and jump in and see for myself — if there really is a flock at the bottom of the stream, I’ll wave to you all.” They went up to the rise, and one of the seven brothers jumped into the raging stream — but it was flowing so fiercely that the poor fellow began thrashing about and waved both his arms at once. Seeing this, and in their excitement believing there really were sheep at the bottom of the stream, the other brothers jumped in too, one after another, and every one of them drowned there in that stream that very day.

From that day on, the villagers were grateful to the hodja for ridding them of the Seven Brothers. And the hodja held his son’s long-awaited wedding feast. For a full forty days and forty nights he fed the poor and the needy and held a wedding in his village.

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Source

Bakırcı, N. (2021). “Hocanın Aklı” Adlı Masalın Sembolik Çözümlemesi [A Symbolic Analysis of the Tale “The Hodja’s Wit”]. TÜRKAV Kamu Yönetimi Enstitüsü Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 37–59.

Original field source: Gökçe, Enis [verification needed — recorded as “Enise Gökçe” in Kocaeli University’s own thesis registry (AVESİS), “Enis Gökçe” in the article’s bibliography], Kocaeli/Gölcük Nüzhetiye (Döşeme) Köyü Monografisi [Village Monograph of Nüzhetiye (Döşeme), Gölcük, Kocaeli], unpublished master’s thesis, Kocaeli University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Turkish Language and Literature (advisor: Işıl Altun), 2018, pp. 192–196. Narrator (source person): not given in the source. Collected by: Enis (Enise) Gökçe. Place of collection: Nüzhetiye (Döşeme) village, Gölcük, Kocaeli. Date of collection: not given in the source. ATU tale type: [verification needed] — no type number is given in the source article; the tale’s motifs (a “gold-dropping” animal, a reviving flute, a sack thrown into a river) resemble the ATU 1535 (“The Rich and the Poor Peasant”) tale family, but this is an observation, not a confirmed classification. Note: two small spelling/OCR corrections were made for readability (“sarılın” → “sarışın”, “iç altını” → “üç altını”); otherwise the text is unaltered. No distinct phonetic dialect was detected in the source, so no dialect note was added.