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Lipizzaners first bred in Slovenia
In fact these magnificent white stallions
were named after a tiny Slovenian village and stud farm called Lipica
only a stone's throw from the Adriatic coast.
 In
the 16th century, the Austrian Archduke Karl was looking for a suitable
site to establish a stud farm for the needs of the Austrian court and
chose Lipica as the ideal spot. It was relatively close to the sea, only
15 km away, yet the climate of the Karst plateau at an altitude of 400
m is excellent. On 19 May 1580, he purchased the entire area so that the
local population had to move to nearby villages. The same year the Baron
Khevenhüller brought a large number of horses from Spain, and in
1581 another 6 studs and 24 mares were brought to Lipica. A year later,
and again in 1584, another herd of horses was brought here from Spain
and northern Italy (Polesina), and the entire breeding stock was mixed
with the local mares.
The stud farm was did not start operating
before 1585 because the stables, the living quarters and a man-made water
supply system, to provide drinking water, had to be built. The first administrator
of the stud farm was Franc Jurko. The royal court was regularly supplied
by a large number of studs and mares from Lipica.
In 1701, the Spanish stud Cordova, with an
excellent pedigree, was brought to Lipica. The number of mares increased
to 150. In 1768, twenty Kladrub mares from the court stud farm of Kopcan
were brought to Lipica, but were returned in 1771 to the reopened court
stud farm at Kladrub in Bohemia. In this period, Spanish and Italian horses
were mostly used for reproduction, and, to a lesser extent, also the horses
from Denmark, northern Germany and Arabia.
The pedigree
The studs Pluto (1772), Conversano (1774), Neapolitano (1783), Favory
(1779) and Maestoso (1786) were the founders of pedigrees, which today
represent the ancestral lines of the Lipizzaners. In 1796, the stud farm
numbered 300 horses. This was the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the
horses were sent to Székésfehervár in Hungary. The
horses began to return the same year, but most of them were moved to Prestranek.
On 15 November 1805, the horses were on the move again. This time they
were taken to Ðakovo in Slavonia, but returned in 1807. When Napoleon
occupied the region again in May 1809, the herd was again taken abroad.
For six years, the horses remained at Pecsek, on the river Maros, in Hungary.
The herd returned to Lipica in 1815 in very poor condition. Then all the
horses were inspected and all animals that did not display Lipizzaner
features were eliminated. In 1816, the Arabian stud called Siglavy was
purchased, and became the co-founder of the new Arabian lineage in the
raising of the Lipizzaner horse. The pedigree has been preserved to this
day and has become the sixth ancestral line of the Lipizzaner.
To Austria
When World War I broke out, most of the stud farm stock was moved to Laxenburg
near Vienna in 1915. After the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy,
the stud farm was taken over by Austria; the number of horses was reduced
and the herd was moved to the state stud farm at Piber near Koflach, in
the Austrian province of Styria. The horses that remained at Kladrup,
provided stock for the newly-founded Czechoslovakian stud farm of the
Lipizzaner horse.
A portion of the Austrian Lipizzaners, a
herd of 109 horses, was taken over by Italy and moved back to Lipica in
1919. The Italians continued raising horses and bred a new type of Lipizzaner
horse that differed from the classical pedigree. During World War II,
the Germans occupied Lipica on 9 September 1943. On 16 October of the
same year, the Germans moved 176 horses to Hostinec in Sudetenland. In
December 1945, the American military authorities handed over a part of
the herd (109 horses) to Italy, and the rest were taken to Piber, Austria.
At that time, Yugoslavia demanded the return of the Lipizzaners, but only
11 horses were handed back. Later, several scores of horses were sent
to Lipica from the former court stud farm at Demir kapija, so that in
1949 Lipica was regenerated, and by 1979, all of the six lines of the
Lipizzaner horse were restored through purchases and exchanges of
breeding mares and studs.
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Source: R. Vojtkovszky: History
and Development of the Autochthonous Lipizzaner in the Slovenian Karst,
Sežana 1995
Story by Marjan Golobic, translator of the didyouknow
Slovenian site
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