created 2025-04-14, & modified, =this.modified
A Turkish fairy tale, structured as a frame story with three inserted tales.
A boy is playing with a golden ball, and breaks a women’s pitcher three times. She curses him to fall in love with a silent princess. As he grows older he wonders who the silent princess was, so much that he gets ill. He reveals the curse to his father, and is granted permission to travel the world to search for her.
The prince goes out with his steward and is given directions to a mountain where the princess sat behind seven veils and never spoke. The mountain is surrounded by human bones and mourners, who warned the prince he needed the leave of the sultan to be escorted in the presence of the princess.
While there the prince bought a nightingale, and found it could talk. It asked him why he was so sad and he told her. She said to go and when he spoke, not to converse with the princess but with the candlestick, and she would tell him a story.
He learned how the king set three suitors to learn something in six months, and the cleverest would win the princess. One learned how to travel a year’s journey in an hour, the other to see things at a distance and the third to cure illness. When they met the saw the princess was dying, they cured her, but the first delivering it but the third’s cure. The princess burst out this breaking her silence.
The nightingale hid on a pillar and the prince talked to it. The nightingale told of a woman who had scorned suitors for many years until she found a white hair and decided to pick one. She set the three of them to tasks. She told the first that her father had died, and was a wizard because his grave was empty. This suitor’s task was the lie in a grave for three hours, so she would be rid of him. She tricked the other suitor into smashing the head of the man in the grave, if he moved. The third suitor she told a wizard had replaced her father’s body in the grave, and she must bring the body to her. She speaks.
The third night, the nightingale hid in the curtains by the door, and told the prince of the carpenter, tailor and student who lived in the same house. The carpenter made a statue of a woman, the tailor dressed it, and the student prayed she might be a living woman. The princess says the student’s prayer meant he should win her.
After speaking each night, all he veils fell, and she agreed to marry the prince.