812 LEBLEBIDJI HOR-HOR AGHA, A GLORIOUS OTTOMAN PEDDLER Emmanouil Seiragakis* In the history of the musical theater, the fact that a play contains some loved numbers is enough to make us consider it as a signiicant production. Moreo- ver, an international career of such a play is also an obvious sign of its great suc- cess. But what about a play that managed not only to cross the borders of a vast Empire, but also to conquest the theater empire of the London’s West End, or to critically afect the theater development of another country? his paper is going to present the fascinating story of the most widespread music play ever written in Turkish, the operetta Leblebidji Hor-hor Agha. he wealth of literature now accumulated on Leblebidji 1 forces me to limit my scope in stopping only at a few stations in its exciting journey. Among, for example, Istanbul, Cairo, Vienna, Smyrna, London, Athens, Paris, Yerevan, Venice, Baku, Pasadena, New York and many other cities and other countries’ capitals, I prefer to focus here only in the performances of 1897 in London, 1883 in Athens and 1875 in Istanbul. * University of Crete, Department of Philology, seiragakis@uoc.gr 1 Adam Mestyan, “‘A garden with mellow fruits of reinement’ Music heaters and cul- tural politics in Cairo and Istanbul, 1867-1892”, unpublished Ph.D. diss., Central Euro- pean University, Budapest 2011, 219-352 and passim; Nikoghos K. Tahmizian, he life and work of Dikran Tchouhadjian, transl. Aris G. Sevag, Passadena 2001, 49-54, 139-148 and passim; Metin And, Osmanlı Tiyatrosu, Ankara 1999; hodoros Chatzepantazes, Το κωμειδύλλιο [he Greek vaudeville], Athens 1981, 58-62, 236-237 and passim. A vast amount of resources on the issue are available in the library of the Institute of Mediter- ranean Studies in Rethymno, and I would like to express here my gratitude to its staf for providing every possible assistance during my research.