First published in 1996. A ten-hour tale, long enough to fill a night in the telling, artful enough to keep all its listeners eagerly awake: such marathon narratives constitute a recurrent theme found in folktales worldwide. This entire book records, annotates and interprets one such rare performance, by Behcet Mahir. a man who joins great storytellers whose art has survived their deaths and transcended their native communities to become the shared heritage of a worldwide audience of lovers of oral tales.