Monument to Hodja Nasreddin

A bronze monument to the folk sage and wit Hodja Nasreddin riding a donkey — on Lyab-i Hauz square in Bukhara, next to the Nadir Divan-Begi Madrasah. The sculpture was put up in 1979 and was the work of Yakov Shapiro. Nasreddin sits sideways on the little donkey, his left hand raised in greeting and a coin gripped between his fingers — a detail people do not notice at once. The figure stands on a low rectangular pedestal, without any railing and level with the passers-by, so people come right up to it: visitors rub his palm and sit down beside him for luck. The monument has long been one of the city's most recognisable symbols. The character himself is no stranger here — it is precisely in Bukhara that the action of Leonid Solovyov's “Tale of Hodja Nasreddin” unfolds; he wrote its first part, “The Troublemaker”, back in 1940, and in 1943 the book was made into the film “Nasreddin in Bukhara”, with Lev Sverdlin in the title role. Stories about Nasreddin circulate across the whole Muslim world, from the Balkans to Xinjiang, and monuments to him stand in Tashkent and in Akshehir in Turkey, where his grave is shown.

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