The Three Orphans
The Kyrgyz, like all ethnic groups, have a wide variety of legends and folk tales. From ancient times the Kyrgyz have honoured the art of story telling. Folk-lore was passed from ayil to ayil (village to village), from bozoi to bozoi (yurt to yurt). Most Kyrgyz can play a musical instrument and know ballads, legends and fairy tales. Story tellers were respected and sometimes called “people’s nightingales” or jomokchu and are welcomed guests in any home.
Some are folk-tales are associated with places, others with events, or aspects of nature, for example tales about animals. Some are moral tales whilst others are like fairy tales. They describe rich and silly Khans, brave hunters, poor peasants and shepherds, beautiful and brave women who give good advice. At the end of the story the poor and clever people usually come out on top.
For International Children’s Day, here is one children’s story that must be quite old because tigers haven’t been seen in the Kyrgyz mountains for over a century:
A kid and a lamb became orphans. One day they went for a walk and met a calf. He was an orphan, too. The three of them became friends and were inseparable. They decided never to part.
One day, they came across a tiger skin lying in the road. They picked it up and put it on the calf and went on their way.
Soon they saw a cave and the kid and the lamb went in, while the calf (dressed in the tiger skin) waited for them outside. As it happened, inside the cave there were a tiger, a bear, a wolf and a fox enjoying a feast. The kid and the lamb greeted them, but stood by the entrance.
“Hello”, they said.
“Oh, hello! Look, meat has come to us!” said the tiger, the bear, the wolf and the fox.
The cave was the home of the fox, and as the host he rose from his seat and said in a sweet voice, “Come in, dear guests. You have arrived just in time,” and then to his companions, “Let’s drink to the health of our dear guests!” As the host, the fox did his best to entertain the company, singing and accompanying himself on the Komuz.
When he had finished, the kid took the Komuz from him and sang:
We’ll make a lovely hat out of the fox,
We’ll make a long warm coat out of the wolf,
We’ll make a nice soft rug out of the bear,
And the tiger will adorn our bozoi
“That kid must have great strength”, the fox thought to himself, and he quietly went out of the cave – where he saw the calf in the tiger skin and, frightened, he ran off.
The other animals waited and waited for him to return, but he never did. So, after a while the wolf went out to look for him. He also saw the calf in the tiger skin, took fright and ran off.
When the wolf did not return either, the tiger turned to the bear and said, “Go and fetch the fox and the wolf!”. The bear got up and left the cave. He saw the calf whom he took to be an unfamiliar tiger and he, too, took fright and ran off.
Eventually, the tiger himself came out of the cave and seeing a strange tiger thought to himself, “He must have eaten up the fox, the wolf and the bear” – and so he too ran off.
The three orphans then finished what was left of the feast before continuing on their way.
Suddenly they met the same tiger, the same bear, the same wolf and the same fox. They were all very angry at how they had been fooled. The orphans were very frightened and they climbed a tall poplar tree. The kid got to the very top, the lamb settled below him and the calf sat on the lowest branch … with a lot of difficulty.
The tiger, the bear, the wolf and the fox stood below, quarreling amongst themselves.
The tiger cried angrily: “You are bad comrades! Why did you run away? Let’s go and fight those babies. But this time I am going to tie you all together so that you don’t run away.” So, the tiger tied them all together and led them to the tree, and they started walking round and round the tree.
The branch on which the calf was sitting suddenly broke and he fell noisily to the ground. “Catch the tiger” shouted the kid from the top of the tree and the tiger, the bear, the wolf and the fox were more frightened than ever and, breaking their bonds, they ran away in different directions.
After that, the kid, the lamb and the calf went up into the mountains. They drank the pure water of the mountain springs and grazed on mountain pastures without fear.
Bishkek