This year the spring symposium organised by the graduate students of the Department of History of Bilkent University in Ankara went by the intriguing name of Galloping History. Its purpose was to address a glaring lacuna in Turkish letters, namely the almost complete absence of scholarly research on the beast that until recently was an ubiquitous and essential feature of everyday life in the Ottoman empire and Turkish republic. Whether it be farming, war-making, process-ing, trading, racing—horses were once everywhere. Today, outside a few areas where they remain useful, or where traditional horse sports survive, they are rather rarely to be seen in the countryside. Instead, horse ownership has for the most part become the province of an elite, and the extent to which horses were an integral part of life in the past has been largely forgotten.
Horse history is a thriving scholarly field in many places, and the Bilkent symposium was an exuberant corrective to Turkish amnesia. A welcoming speech by historian and former Topkapı Palace director, İlber Ortaylı, was followed by the opening of an exhibition of old photographs and old horse-related books and pamphlets, and participants then had the chance to commune with three equines brought on campus for the purpose. Some of those presenting their research at the conference were themselves riders, while others had had little hands-on experience.
Having admitted how little we know about Ottoman horses, even about those whose owners figure prominently in the written record – sultans and pashas, for instance – we listened to papers from Turkish scholars about the procurement of horses for the palace; palace horse furniture; horse-breeding; and horses in the 1768–74 Ottoman–Russian war; horses sent to the pavilion at the 1893 World Fair in Chicago. In addition, we heard about an early seventeeth century Ottoman manuscript containing 164 horse portraits, and Armenian manuscripts on equine medicine produced in eastern Anatolia.
Horses were once deeply embedded within human history, and when transplanted from one culture to another, performed a role as agents of change. In the English case, this has been well-illustrated in the writing of Donna Landry, a longtime horse historian, and speaker at Bilkent, whose recent book Noble Brutes. How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture shows that it took only a generation of crossbreeding with local horses to produce the Thoroughbred. This innovation in its turn revolutionised England’s racing and equestrian traditions, literature and art, and thereby profoundly influenced the existing social order.
The themes taken up in the symposium were accordingly wide-ranging: horses as indicators of their owner’ status and class; the horse as a metaphor in human emotion; the symbolism of horse colour; horse eugenics; Carolingian horse travel; horses taken to the Americas by the Spanish; western wonder at horses from the Ottoman east; horses in Native American culture; the taboo against eating horse meat in the USA in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; the some 75,000 horses sent from Idaho for the British army fighting the Boer War; a pre-WW1 Russian cavalry journal; and women race riders in Morocco today.
The activities concluded with a roundtable that included Kudret Emiroğlu, one of the co-authors of Yoldaşımız At, or Our Comrade, the Horse. This storehouse of horse knowledge has thus far been the bible of Ottoman and Republican equine history. With the Galloping History symposium a first step has been taken towards more systematic investigation of materials relating to horses in the historical record. Such a promising beginning must surely lead to the development of what deserves to become a crowded area of research.
Caroline Finkel is the author of Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1600–1923 and co-author with Kate Clow and Donna Landry of The Evliya Çelebi Way: Turkey's First Long-Distance Walking and Riding Route.