What’s the link between the Ottoman Empire, Leonid Brezhnev and the Arabian stallion sold by a Dutch horse-breeder to the US for 1.5 million dollars? Answer: The ‘breeding grounds’ of the Kabiyuk horse ‘factory’ – the sleepy and deserted meadows south of the Danube, on which hundreds of horses gallop.

Kabiyuk is the oldest stud farm in Bulgaria. It was founded in 1864 by Midhat Pasha, the Governor of Ruse, for the purposes of supplying the Ottoman Empire’s army with horses. During the last decades of Ottoman rule on the Balkans, Turkish horse-breeding – which had become an art form, was transplanted to Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Bosnia.

According to travellers, the stallions with which the Turkish army went into battle , “like to a wedding,” were one of the Ottoman Empire’s key military advantages. Robert Bargrave, the Levantine merchant, wrote that he had “never seen such horses, and that in great number, as all Christendom cannot vie with.... The most inferior of them would in England be the greatest gallants.”

Kabiyuk was the Bulgarian spot in which the Empire practiced its art. Nowadays, the empty, sleepy alleys framed by century-old trees in the farm are reminiscent of a deserted park rather than a military equestrian base. But at the end of the nineteenth century, it was built precisely as such. When Midhat Pasha searched for a place to build the horse farm, he used a popular technique of the time: hanging pieces of raw meat on trees throughout the region, in order to see where the least amount of flies would gather. The best place turned out to be 13 kilometres northeast of Shumen.

The stables, built from solid stone, were quickly filled with more than 1,000 Turkish horses. The Ottoman Empire raised some of its purest breeds on the Balkans - Karaman, Uzunyayla, Rumeli, Kastamonu. It fed them ryegrass, which also originated on the peninsula and later spread to Europe and North America, where it became a major crop used in horse-breeding.

When Istanbul started losing the lands south of the Danube during the Russo-Turkish War in 1878, its retreating troops took away all the Kabiyuk horses to Anatolia. The Bulgarians, high on their newly-acquired independence, found the stables empty.



From that moment on, Kabiyuk’s fate followed all the twists and turns of Bulgaria’s contemporary history. After an unsuccessful attempt to restore it in the 1880s, in 1894 it began operation under the sinister-sounding name State Horse Factory, Warehouse for Stallions and Horse Repair Depot, bringing Orwellian scenes to mind: gigantic stone moulds pressing on a mash of bones, meat, blood and hair; a worker in dungaree overalls unscrewing a nut on a horse’s stomach, machine oil gushing out.

The Bulgarian authorities consistently realised this vision for Kabiyuk and at the beginning of the twentieth century, genetic engineering was in full swing. Besides stallions, they also bred sheep, cattle, pigs and birds. They selected a few of the region’s agricultural pride species, among them the industrially-named copper-red Shumen sheep and the black Shumen hen. Later, the farm was renamed to State Factory for Livestock and Depot for Male Brood. The socialist regime, in turn, named the horse factory after the communist leader Vasil Kolarov, who was born in the nearby town of Shumen.

The commercial history of the horse farm had its ups and downs through the years, but its most successful deal was a 1984 episode of particular entertainment value, which involved Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.



Everything started a decade earlier, when the Aswan Dam in Egypt was inaugurated. Gamal Abdel Nasser gave Brezhnev a pure-blooded Arabian horse as a sign of gratitude for the help in the dam’s construction. A few years later, Bulgaria somehow managed to lay its hands on a stallion called Moment – the only male offspring of the Egyptian horse.

Following some tensions, with Moscow demanding its stallion back, while Sofia refused to return it, Moment remained the property of Kabiyuk . From there, he was sold for the then-record high price of a half a million dollars to a Dutch horse-breeder. According to media accounts, he resold it in the US for 1.5 million dollars.

This commercial success was never repeated. At the dawn of democracy, Kabiyuk became a joint-stock company and corruption and bad management almost brought it to the ground. Either way, the horse farm survived as a state property and now raises four different breeds: the East Bulgarian selected here, the Purebred Arabian, the Thoroughbred, and the Shagya Arabian.

Almost 30,000 decares of land have been put aside for pastures and dressage grounds. In recent years, many horse farms were founded and rebuilt in Bulgaria, but none of them have the historical taste which can be felt here. The feeling comes not only from the old trees and the massive stables but also from the fact that the former Bulgarian monarchy had a soft spot for Kabiyuk.

In the only horse museum on the Balkans, located on the park’s territory, a chariot is preserved, which belonged to Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Bulgaria’s second monarch.



The stately summer villa of his predecessor, Alexander Battenberg, is the first building one sees upon entering the complex. It’s the place where the prince, highly criticized by historians as feeble-minded, took one of his most difficult decisions. In 1885, he signed here the decree for the unification of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia – the two halves of Bulgaria’s present-day territory, in this way risking a serious conflict with Moscow, his most important ally at the time.

The frequent royal presence in Kabiyuk at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century has given the complex an air of provincial elegance, typical of the Central and Eastern European resorts which sprung up at the time. In the stables’ backyards and the breeders’ houses, however, one encounters the widespread poverty which plagues the Bulgarian countryside.

Seldom visited by tourists, Kabiyuk is a true horses’ town – the place where they are both masters and gods. According to the breeders’ confessions in local media, here every day is St. Todor’s Day (celebrated as the Day of the Horse in Bulgaria) and horses get a bucket of grated carrots with sugar for their birthday.

Practicalities

How to get there

The road to Kabiyuk is near Shumen, off the highway connecting Sofia to Varna. There is no road sign to the horse farm, so look out for signs to the village of Makak. When you pass it, take the road to the village of Konyuvets. Once you get on that road, the distance to Kabiyuk is around 10 km. You drive by the fenced-up grazing meadows and the riding terrains until the road makes a 90 degree turn near Battenberg’s erstwhile summer villa and reaches the entry to the complex.

When to go

April, May, June, September, October and November. During the rest of the year, Shumen is known for its extreme temperatures, even though a walk in the park could be quite pleasant on an overcast summer day or during a milder winter. On March 15 – St. Todor’s Day and Bulgaria’s Day of the Horse, one is likely to encounter crowds, but also witness some interesting spectacles, such as the traditional kushia, or horse racing.

There isn’t a restaurant in the region, just a single provincial general store, which sells anything from laundry detergent to bread in a very small space. Kabiyuk, however, is a great place for a picnic.