The Obayan Mares fr OM Tre balzane sTud

by MOnika savier

How can one optimally enjoy life in the countryside while compensating for the disadvantages compared to the big city? What are the advantages of country life, of direct contact with nature? Definitely horses, a hobby I have more or less actively carried around with me since childhood. Then, when I left my job at the university in Berlin in the mid-80s and started my new job in the environmental field in Italy, the decision was made.

An old abandoned farm was first occupied, then later leased and restored. First our riding horses stood in the sheep pens and later a group of English Thoroughbred mares were added for breeding.

If you have horses in Italy, you have to make a pilgrimage to Verona at least once, in November, for the international horse fair, the Mecca of horse lovers. My idea was to lease an Arabian stallion and cross it with my English Thoroughbred mares to breed Anglo Arabians. In Verona, in the early 90s, I met the Italian breeder Loris Beccheroni. He had a stallion for me, not just any show stallion, but Ibn Insiatur, an original import from Persia's Bedouin breeding. He originally belonged to Shah Reza Pahlevi, whose rule was abruptly ended by the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran. His horses were in acute danger as the Revolutionary Guards associated them with the WAHO and the West. To this end, Ibn Insiatur and other asil Iranian Hamdani Arabians bred by Mary Gharazoglou, owed their lives to the efforts of Gustl Eutermoser and Ulrike Marcik from Austria. As the story goes, they kidnapped the horses from the royal stud in Tehran and rode them, from Iran via Anatolia and western Turkey to Austria. Inevitably, the story fascinated me, the stallion seemed like an archaeological find and I was convinced that he would fit into my performance breeding. One successful breeding season and many village races later, the stallion had to go back to Bologna. We loved him and Tina, my groom, who had always ridden him, wanted to buy the stallion, but he was far too expensive for our means. When the truck with three men arrived, the stallion stood transfixed at the ramp. He did not want to leave his new "asylum". After many friendly attempts, a fourth man came. He blindfolded him, and from behind two men went at his croup with a broom. Ibn Insiatur did not move. Two more "experts" were called in to help, the time passed.

Finally, I interrupted the "experts" and called Tina, who did not want to be there. I asked her to try for the stallion's sake, she went to the truck, took the rope, the stallion followed her as if he had been waiting for her and calmly let himself be tied up. We never saw him again, but his more than 30 foals born the following year, and his legendary reputation made Tre Balzane a respectable stud. I asked myself after this experience, why not breed pure bred Arabians right away?

Until then, Arabian horses had not been part of my life. The past is a broad concept, hadn't Europeans already been travelling in the Arabian countries on behalf of the kings to import desert Arabians over 200 years ago? These horses were rooted in Europe long before present day Arabian breeding. It dawned on me that I needed to know more about this bygone era in order to better understand the Arabian horses in our modern world and to be able to integrate them in their species-appropriate way. Reading alone did not teach me, because the Arriving of the obAyAn mAre sulifAh

I lacked the identification with the countries of origin, an advantage that Arabian breeders in the Middle East have over others. Arabian horses evoke an emotional response, even without cultural appropriation.

I visited places of knowledge and experience, the former Royal Stud Marbach, the State Stud Babolna in Hungary, Janov Podlaski in Poland, the racecourse in Warsaw, Dr. Nagel's Katharinenhof.

I then made a decision. In 1996, the filly SULIFAH entered the stud. She was bred by Siegfried Manz, out of Dr. Nagel's breeding lines. Her grand dam Marah was one of the four root mares imported to Katharinenhof Stud from El Zahraa/Egypt. Sulifah was special. In many respects, she resembled her male grandsire Salaa El Dine and her female grandsire, Jamil. With her class and her charisma, it was quickly apparent that she was destined to found a family line of her own in the stud. Her mother instinct and fertility were impressive, and this was something she passed on to all her daughters.

Their good offspring made Sulifah and Tre Balzane very quickly known in various countries, especially in Egypt. Also in Italy we participated at ICAHO shows with her and her offspring. The stallions, on the other hand, were ridden by us.

Sulifah's first daughter, the bay TB Hasna, stayed at the stud and later took her place as foundation mare. Her sire was KEN Mahbub, son of the European Champion KEN Asam and bred by Sylvie and Wolfgang Eberhardt. His dam Bint Bint Mahiba was out of the mating of Ansata Halim Shah and Kis Mahiba, a mare from Dr. Nagel's Katharinenhof. KEN Mahbub was also an excellent riding horse with a great character. He later went into endurance sport in northern Italy.

Sulifah did not remain the only foundation mare at the stud, over the years I also acquired good fillies from other pure Egyptian bloodlines, such as the Dahman Shahwans and the Siglawies. With the example of Sulifah I can illustrate that if you stay true to your breeding goal and have confidence in your mares, quality foals will certainly be born. You also have to have the courage to use interesting stallions that are better than the mares, at least in terms of phenotype. I have never mated stark opposites, the result is a big risk, but when I honestly thought about my mares, I thought of many aspects that should be specifically improved. In Cairo I found a noble stallion of a fine type, a good body and a lot of charisma.

IBN EL NIL RHM from Giza. His dam, Nile Allure by Ansata Halim Shah travelled in utero from Ansata Stud to Kuwait. She was in foal to Montasir. His granddam, Ansata Nile Magic was in turn a daughter of Dr. Nagel's Jamil, as was Sulifah. Ibn El Nil was very successful on the racetrack and meanwhile also a winner at Arabian shows. I liked this combination of nobility and functionality. The vendor showed me some very nice foals by him. The stallion had a difficult character and was still expensive, but somehow I managed to get him to Italy. During a later visit to the state stud El Zahraa in Cairo, I asked the studbook guide how many foals Ibn El Nil had? "None so far, he seems to be sterile", was the answer. the three dAughters of tb hAsnA

When the stallion arrived, he looked swollen, almost waxy, he ate and ate and became thinner and thinner. After three months he was a skeleton. The vets put this down to permanent doping with testosterone. Eventually he got his act together and slowly put on weight again. His testicles, which were as big as cherries at first, normalised slightly. He could now go to the Phantom twice a week. My stud manager Elisabeth Auer even started to ride him again. Special food, training, grazing with mares, massages, the whole programme to get him fertile again. We learned a lot about infertility of Arabian stallions.

After one year Sulifah was in foal to him. TB Sabah El Nil was born, who later made her career in Cairo.

From the bay TB Hasna I have kept TB Helwa as well as TB Hejaziya and TB Heba. They complete the mare herd of the Obayan family.

The following year TB Hasna by Ibn El Nil was in foal. TB Helwa was born. Like her sire, she is a combination of fire and gentleness. And she passes this on to her foals. Three years later Ibn El Nil could be seen as a stallion again. Unfortunately, I succumbed to the temptation to lease him again to Cairo for two years. After six weeks the first mare there was in foal, but Ibn El Nil had to be put down, he had broken his hind leg in the paddock. His son TB Hafid El Nil, the full brother of TB Helwa, was later imported to Cairo to continue his father's story.

TB Helwa's most famous daughter was TB Faysa. Her father was Jamil Al Rayyan. This mating was great. Fayza had everything, charm, type, gaits, she danced in hand and she won shows. It was difficult for the judges not to score her well, she did it all by herself.

I sold her at the age of three to a member of the royal family in Doha, Qatar. But she never arrived. She died halfway, whilst in quarantine.

Two years later TB Haya was born, the full sister of TB Faysa. Again the mating with Jamil Al Rayyan had worked perfectly, even though Haya is a different kind of beauty. She too was sold to the Al Thani royal family in Doha and competes successfully at shows there.

TB Hejaziya, a chestnut mare, is the daughter of Ramses (Adnan x Ansata

Rebecca). He came from Katharinenhof and was a friendly stallion with good offspring that we enjoyed riding. Today he is also standing in Cairo. TB Hejaziya has produced several impressive foals, including the black stallion TB Haytham

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TB Heba translates as "the gift". I named her this because her mother TB Hasna gave birth to her by caesarean section. Thanks to the expert university hospital at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Perugia, mother and daughter survived, which is apparently very rare. Usually the foal suffocates from the mother's anaesthesia, I was told.

TB Heba is perhaps for this reason a favourite mare and she thanks us with extraordinarily beautiful foals and great gentleness. Her sire is NK Sharaf El Dine from Katharinenhof. He is one of the best sons of Salaa El Dine.

I had bred several mares to Al Adeed Al Shaqab, TB Heba produced the best foal of this mating, the beautiful TB Alia, who later became Andrea Dello Iacono's favourite mare in Napoli.

Last year TB Jaidaa was born, a sibling to TB Fayza and TB Haya and of the same quality, because her sire is also the outstanding sire Jamil Al Rayyan (Ansata Hejazi x Dana Al Rayyan). Maybe she will represent the next generation at Tre Balzane Stud.

We already have the right stallion for that. Nabeel Al Khaled, He resembles Ibn El Nil in many ways. He has type, charm and nobility but he has a great character and is very fertile. His dam Ansata Nile Pearl comes from the same dam line as Nile Allure by Ibn El Nil. Times are difficult for horse breeding. A lot of time and money goes into horse breeding before you have a good horse in your hands. Shows are now useless as a criterion for quality and selection.

P. Paraskevas rightly wrote about this: "The inner attitude, the essential original inner values such as courage, humanity and the nobility originally so deeply rooted in the Arabian, are shockingly neglected, because they can neither be measured nor shown in the show ring. And because they cannot be shown, advertised and weighed out with money, the intangible values in which the true greatness of the Arabian is rooted are largely ignored at shows today."

Many ideas abound, but in the end the horse business always dominates. One could add to the quotation and make the statement that the show ring takes away, from most horses, the natural trust in humans that we breeders have built up with the foals from their birth through empathy, horse-friendly rearing and education. However, should positive alternatives be created, many breeders and I would be happy to be involved again.

by Monika Savier

Paul Lamers can be described as a veteran of Belgium’s original Arabian horse people. Already, as a young rider, he demonstrated his deep empathy for horses. In 1987, he met Winand Bijnens, the then President of the Belgian Arabian Horse Association, and was able to train his horses. They were straight Egyptian Arabians. This was a challenge in this different environment. Belgium is a country dominated by agriculture, bordering the Netherlands to the north, Germany and Luxembourg to the east and France to the south. The west is washed by the Atlantic Channel and its capital, Brussels, is also the administrative capital of the European Union. In keeping with the tradition of its neighbouring countries, Belgium also has a successful history in equestrian sport and horse breeding. The Belgian warmblood breed is an internationally successful showjumping and dressage horse of powerful and large size that dominates the Belgian sport horse scene and this is also an economic factor.

But it is not just a matter of economy. With the interest in so many multicultural dimensions on the part of the international EU administration, there was the great passion of some horse lovers to import fine exotics from the East, namely Purebred Arabians. For many fans of Arabian horses in this country, beauty was not everything, but it was precisely because of the exotic beauty and elegance of these horses in relation to the sport horses that the desire for Arabians crystallized more and more in Belgium and also in the Netherlands and West Germany, whether they came from Tersk in Russia, Poland and more rarely, Egypt.

Paul Lamers commented: “I loved these fine elegant Arabian horses, they were more intelligent in training and if you treat them like a partner without pressure, they were loyal and would always cooperate.” A few years later Sabine Lens became his partner, and both were now working with Arabian horses. The first horse with which they had lasting show success was the EAO stallion IBN BARRADA by Gad Allah out of Barrada of Ikhnatoon, imported from Egypt. This authentic, typey chestnut also dominated the open shows in the 90s, as the first Egyptian Event was still years away. Sabine and Paul founded “O.O.X Training Stables” and presented mainly Straight Egyptians, which again had a different type and a finer conformation than the Russian and Polish Arabians from the area. The Arabian horse associations in Europe organized breeding shows where especially the offspring of the good mares and stallions could impress and also be sold. The judging criteria were developed by the newly founded ECAHO (European Conference of Arab Horse Organizations) and the shows at that time in the 80s and 90s were the place to be with Arabian horses.

Sabine and Paul left the world of amateurs and dedicated themselves completely and successfully to professional show training and showing. Their love was unreservedly for the Straight Egyptians. “We accompanied the horses everywhere, to the shows, back then, and we slept in the service stalls next to the horses. For us it was not an option to retire comfortably to a hotel in the evening. It had something of a modern nomadic feel to it. The stables were open to all during the shows and visitors came to have a coffee with us and discuss the horses. We were a community and although there were conflicts, we had something in common that created a strong cohesion, namely the work with the horses, which we all enjoyed,” Sabine Lens says about the 90s show scene.

At the beginning of 2000, things slowly changed, the classic breeding show became a beauty contest, a catwalk for horses with panda-eyes and pearl halters. They now increasingly came from the Gulf region, which provided the show business with new money and the ECAHO adjusted the selection criteria accordingly.

The breeders of Straight Egyptians mostly did not want to jump on this wave of the new show world. Consequently, the format of the “Straight Egyptian Event”, once created by the Pyramid Society in the USA, came into being. From the German Pyramid Society Europe came the idea for the title show Egyptian Event Europe, which took place for many years in Lanaken, Belgium.

Paul was tired of the show circus after 20 years and didn’t want to show horses himself anymore, but the couple supported the Oben family, who were the organizers, with practical and organizational help and also had their own horses presented there, because in the meantime they had founded the farm El La Diva Stud.

It came about like this: Ibn Barrada’s owner, Bernard Van de Putte, imported the mare Qublah (Ibn Morafic x Qisani) from Canada to Belgium in 1998. She was in foal to the SE Show stallion Safeen (Ibn Safinaz x Abitibi Madeena). Qublah stood, like the other show horses of Bernard, in the OOX training stables. When the foal CD Anasta was born there, Paul and Sabine made their decision quickly. This foal should stay. This was a good decision and the bay typey CD Anasta, who also has an excellent body, became the stud’s foundation mare, and with great success. But where did she come from?

Qublah, the dam of CD Anasta, embodies the Who’s Who of American Straight Egyptians imported to Texas in the 60’s by Douglas B Marshall (Gleannloch Farms) from EAO, El Zahraa in Cairo. Besides the early Ansata imports, the Douglas B Marshall imports were the elite of the Straight Egyptians at that time and the basis for the world success of these horses, also in Europe and later in the Gulf States. Qublah’s dam

Qisani was sired by Soufian, a Moniet El Nefous son. She was also imported by Douglas B Marshall from EAO, as was the later world-famous stallion Morafic, whose son Ibn Morafic was the sire of Qublah. Anasta’s female line trace back to the influential mare Rodania and thus belongs to the Kuhaylah Rudaniyah tribe. She was born to the Ruala Bedouins in 1869 and was one of the Root Mares of Lady Blunt’s Sheykh Obeyd Stud in Cairo.

CD Anasta’s sire, Safeen was the stallion that won the most shows in the 1990s and was also a top show producer through his offspring. His sire, Ibn Safinaz, who was imported to the USA from Cairo/ EAO in 1982, was also an extremely successful show champion in the USA, Paul and Sabine founded their El La Diva stud and, true to their principle of class over quantity, they first concentrated on CD Anasta and selected her to be bred to the stallion Ansata Nile Echo. La Diva Noor and La Diva Nile-La were born out of this mating and remained as foundation mares at the stud. ‘Never change a winning team’ was the concept and four more foals by CD Anasta and Ansata Nile Echo confirmed the quality of this match. The stallion Sahib by Salaa El Dine also mated Anasta successfully and the beautiful daughter La Diva Noaa was born. Anasta’s offspring and grandchildren can be found in Saudi Arabia, Israel, China, Albania, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium.

A few years later the impressive mare Pashmina (Salaa El Dine x A little Passion) came to the stud and produced the pretty filly La Diva Naseema with Naseem Al Rashediah and the colt La Diva Jawhar with Ezz Al Rashediah.

Paul Lamers and Sabine Lens were impressed by the type and charisma of the NK horses at Katharinenhof and after several visits there they decided to bring home the typey NK Nizam daughter Al Qusar Madiba out of Masara Al Qusar, bred by Robert Schlereth, for their breeding. Thus, the first Dahmah Shawaniyah mare moved in with El La Diva.

Monika: What is the most important thing for you when selecting horses for breeding?

Paul: “I look for refinement and nobility in the Arabian horse, by that I also mean their character, not just the body & type. But I still look very carefully at the legs, they are also important to me, because today, when I only breed, I try to get as close as possible to my ideal”. Sabine: “Not only the character and type are important to me, but also the pedigree of our horses. Pedigrees tell their cultural history; they are the witnesses of the past and we are also responsible to give meaning to their pedigrees through their foals for the future of the breed”.

Monika: That also means you don’t do an embryo transfer, where many full siblings with the same pedigrees in the same year are part of a commercial concept and no longer part of the cultural history of the breed?

Paul: “There is no real reason to do embryo transfers. We breed in generations and want to be able to judge the result of each mating accurately and also learn from it for the future. In my opinion, industrialized animal reproduction has no place in our breeding. It is not about producing a lot of horses for the market, but about selective breeding of chosen horses that are worth the good reputation of the Arabian. We have the responsibility for that when we have Arabian horses in our stables and breed with them.” q

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