Unlucky Panos
Once upon a time, there lived a poor man named Panos. He wasn’t a bad person, but he had one big problem: no matter what he did, everything turned out terribly. Because of this, people nicknamed him "Unlucky Panos."Panos didn’t have much property. All he owned was a pair of oxen, a cart, and an axe.
One day, he hitched his oxen to the cart, took his axe, and went to the forest to chop wood. While in the forest, Panos thought to himself: "What’s the point of all this? First, I’ll struggle to chop down the tree. Then I’ll struggle again to lift the heavy trunk onto the cart. No way! I’ll do it differently: I’ll position the oxen under the tree, and the felled trunk will just fall right into the cart!"
And so he did. He positioned the oxen under the tree and started chopping. Finally, with a deafening crack, the tree fell to the ground, crushing both the oxen and the cart under its weight.
Panos was stunned: "It’s all because of the tree—it was too heavy. Or maybe it’s the oxen’s fault—they should’ve jumped out of the way. It’s always like this: someone else is to blame, and I’m the one who suffers." He picked up his axe and trudged home, scratching his head in deep thought.
His path led him along the shore of a lake. There, on the lake, he spotted a flock of wild ducks. "Aha!" thought Panos. "I won’t return home empty-handed—I’ll kill a duck and bring it to my wife." He took aim, swung, and hurled his axe at the ducks.
With a flurry of quacks and squawks, the ducks scattered: some flew up into the sky, while others hid among the reeds. The axe, however, sank like a stone to the bottom of the lake. Panos stood on the shore, lost in thought: what should he do?
Finally, he undressed, left his clothes on the shore, and waded into the water to search for the axe. The deeper he went, the more the water rose. When it became too deep, Panos got scared that he might drown and turned back toward the shore.
Meanwhile, as Unlucky Panos was wandering through the reeds at the bottom of the lake, a traveler passed by along the shore. The traveler noticed the clothes lying on a rock. He looked around—no one was in sight.
Panos was hidden by the reeds! The traveler thought, "If there’s no owner, why let good things go to waste?" He took the clothes and walked off with them.
When Panos finally made it back to shore, he couldn’t find his clothes. He was left completely naked. Again, Panos pondered: "Where should I go now?"
Waiting for nightfall, Unlucky Panos headed back to his village. As he walked, he kept thinking: "If I show up in the village naked, what will people think of me? I’ll go to my brother’s house first—it’s on the edge of the village—and get some clothes from him. Then I’ll make my way home without any trouble." And so he went straight to his brother’s house.
That evening, his brother happened to have guests over—they were celebrating some kind of holiday. Panos slightly opened the front door to peek inside and see who the guests were. One of the guests, thinking it must be a dog, tossed a bone through the crack. It flew out and hit Panos right in the eye. The poor man howled in pain and ran off toward home.
Meanwhile, the dogs started barking so loudly that people began coming out of their houses to see what was going on. They saw a naked man running through the village, chased by dogs. Without much thought, they concluded: "What kind of scarecrow is this? It must be the devil himself!" They started shouting, cursing, and swearing at him, driving him back into the forest. As they chased him, the dogs managed to bite one of his legs. Unlucky Panos found himself back in the forest—naked, blind in one eye, and limping. And there, he disappeared without a trace.
The next day, word spread through the village: "Panos is missing. He went to the forest for firewood and never came back." The villagers gathered and decided to send volunteers into the forest to search for him.
In the forest, they found the cart and oxen crushed by the fallen tree. But Panos was nowhere to be seen. Then they encountered a wanderer wearing Panos’s clothes.
"Hey, buddy, where’d you get that outfit?"
"Friends, these things were just lying around. I found them on the lakeshore and took them—no sense in letting good stuff go to waste."
The villagers went to the lake and searched everywhere. But it was no use—Panos was gone, and that was that!
The people concluded that Panos must have drowned. They held a memorial service at the church for the repose of his soul, and afterward, they held a funeral feast in his honor.
Panos’s widow grieved and wept bitter tears, always remembering him with kind words. But when the mourning period ended, she married another man and went to live with him.
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