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Hitar Petar is a hero of the
Bulgarian folklore. As his name suggests, in
Bulgarian, he is smart and witty. He
is a hero of many Bulgarian folk tales.
In one of them, Hitar Petar defeats
evil dragons.
During the great flood all dragons were drowned because they didn’t know how to swim , but they could
fly in the sky with their wings .
Only one dragon survived traveling around the world and finally made a a witch’s cave in Bulgaria its home and after not so long
time it went to hunt heroes.
The dragon first met Hitar Petar. It asked him whether he was hero and what he could do. Hitar Petar said that he can transform a stone into water only if he squeezed the
stone well.
The dragon did not believe and decided to try. The dragon took a stone from the ground, squeezed it but his
attempt was unsuccessful.
Hitar Petar bent down, took another
stone from the ground and
without to be seen by the dragon he took also a loaf of cheese in his hand.
He smashed the cheese and water flowed down from
it.
„Look at me
now!”
„Wow! You are a bigger hero than me! Let’s become friends.”
They became friends and went to see if they could find something for lunch. After a walk they reached a tall cherry tree. The cherries were ripe but they were very high. That wasn’t a problem for the
dragon-he was very tall. He started eating handfuls of ripe cherries from the top, but because of the height Hitar Petar couldn’t reach
even the lowest cherry.
Hitar Petar walked round the cherry tree but he couldn’t reach even a cherry. Then the dragon bent
down the top of the tree and said:
„Now pick some cherries and hold the tree tight !”
Hitar Petar held tight the bench, picked a cherry but before he could put it in his mouth the animal dropped
the bench and Petar flew like a bird in the sky.
He landed near a blackthorn, where there was a sleeping
rabbit. The rabbit woke up and swiftly ran away.
„Hey, brother, what did you do?”
„I saw that rabbit and decided to jump over the tree and catch it but I wasn’t fast enough and it ran away.”
When it got darker, the both friends went to the dragon’s cave. The witch told the dragon, in dragon’s language, to
kill that man at night because he looked dangerous.
„ But he is a bigger hero than me.”
„ When he fall asleep, take the heaviest hammer and hit him!”
As a witty man, Hitar Petar understood what was going to happen. Before going to bed, he went quietly outside,
filled a sack with stones and put it under the covers in his bed.
Hitar Petar hide himself behind
the door waiting to see what would
happen. Around midnight, the dragon came and beat the hidden sack under the
covers in the bed.
„I killed him!”
„Wow, you are alive! I killed you last night with the
hammer!”
„Really? I thought some fleas were biting me.”
“And don’t try to kill me because I am very hardy-
with boiling water.”
„Please make me hardy, too, we are
friends.”
In the morning the dragon asked the witch to boil
water. Hitar Petar asked him to enter into a big
wooden barrel and nailed it up. After that he poured
a big amount of boiling water on him.
The dragon started to scream but the man told him not to scream because he was being trained in this way.
„Wooow, my friend, I am going to burn!”
„ Have patience, my friend,
you’ll become
hardy like me!”
He told the which to open the barrel after sunset and to let the dragon go out. Hitar Petar went away and the
witch done what she was told. When she saw the dragon in the evening it was boiled.
That’s how Hitar Petar defeated the last
dragon on this Earth.
This is Valentino Boichev-the artist from the 5th grade
who was the author of
illustrations for the story about Hitar Petar and
the Dragon.
We hope you will like it!
