Cleverest Man In The World

Cleverest Man In The World

Nasreddin Hodja

At the time of the Hodja, some clever and educated men were searching for an intelligent man, who could answer their three questions.
They traveled through the whole world and then came to Akshehir. They asked:
“Who is most intelligent man in this town?”
Of course the people of the town brought the Hodja to the three men and they began to ask.

“First question: Where is the central point of the world?”
The Hodja's donkey was with him. So he pointed to his donkey.
“Where the front legs of my donkey are, there is the middle point of the world.”
“How can you prove that?” asked one of the men.
“If you don't believe, you can measure it”, the Hodja said.
Measuring did not seem a good idea to them, so they went on to the next question.
“How many stars are on the sky?”
The Hodja replied without hesitation:
“As many as the hairs on my donkey's mane.”
The three men laughed.
“If you don't believe it,” said the Hodja. “you can count them.”
The foreigners understood that they couldn't get a correct reply and one of them asked:
“Can you say how many hairs are in your donkey's mane?”
“Oh, yes”, said the Hodja. “There are exactly the same number of hairs as you have in your beard. Now don't tell me, that you don't believe that because I can prove it by pulling one hair from your beard and one from the donkey's mane. When we pull each hair out one after the other, you can see at the end that there are the same number of hairs.”
The three men went back to their country and told everyone that the cleverest man in the world lived in Akshehir.