Children's & YA
Nazar the Brave
by Derenik Demirchyan
Thousands of tailors, shoemakers, lazy vagabonds, “renowned” and unknown, bachelors or those terrified of “wretched wife’s indictments” who dreams of becoming a queen set on a journey to find their fortune some of them having written mottos on their self-proclaimed bravery on their flags, and some of them on the blade of their swords and some of them on their armor to create one of the best pieces of world fairy tales which can be conditionally named “Nazartales”. Nazar, no matter what “noble” titles he is represented with, is a national “hero” in different cultures. He was “honored” by Hovhannes Tumanyan and the Brothers Grimm, Alexander Afanasyev and Italo Calvino, Joseph Jacobs and Avetik Isahakyan. But our Nazar is still different – “Center of the universe”. The number of beasts he killed counts thousands. Have you heard such a thing?! The German tailor kills 7 flies in the best case, the poor shoemaker from the Albion – a dozen of flies, the Italian counterpart – 500. Our pahlavan perfectly handles rhetoric, “I say five, and you should understand thousand”.
