South African Lipizzaners
The South African Lipizzaners are a classic-style riding school in Kyalami , Midrand ( Gauteng ) in South Africa . In contrast to other classic riding schools , only women ride and train the 40 Lipizzaner stallions. Public performances of the high school take place weekly.
history
Around 1890, a Lipizzan herd from Terezovac ( Croatia ), a property of the Janković-Bésán family, was divided due to inheritance issues. A second stud was then founded in Cabuna (not far from Terezovac). After the dissolution of the Slavonian property of the Janković-Bésáns at the end of the 1920s, breeding was moved to Hungary, namely to Öreglak.
In 1944, Count Elemér Janković-Bésán de Pribér-Vuchin fled from Öreglak with six Lipizzaner mares and two Lipizzaner stallions. Via Sünching , where his parents' stud was located, he fled to Dorset , where the horses were hired on Lord Digby's estate for Christmas 1946 . At Christmas 1948, Janković-Bésán brought the horses to South Africa, where he settled with his Lipizzaners in Mooi River in KwaZulu-Natal .
Major George Iwanowski (born March 13, 1907, † May 28, 2008), a former Polish cavalry officer, single-handedly began to establish classical horsemanship in South Africa. Ivanovsky was born on his family's estate in Lebiodka , eastern Poland (now Belarus ). He graduated from the Warsaw School of Agriculture . In his thesis he wrote about horse breeding. After two years as Vice Director at the Polish National Stud Bogusławice, he graduated from the cavalry school and joined the army. After the Second World War he took over the Lauvenburg stud in the Rhineland for two years. Then he went to South Africa. Together with Josy Hicks, Iwanowski founded the Centaur Stables in Johannesburg , the first home of the South African Lipizzaners .
In 1951, Count Janković-Bésán met Georg Iwanowski at the Royal Agricultural Show in Pietermaritzburg and invited him to his farm in Mooi River. Janković-Bésán offered Iwanowski the Lipizzaner stallion Maestoso Erdem for training . Ivanovsky trained the stallion up to high school. Janković-Bésán later had to sell his Lipizzaner breed for financial reasons.
The Lipizzaner stallions and mares of the South African Lipizzaners are direct descendants of the Lipizzaner breed by Janković-Bésán. The South African Lipizzaners run a stud with around 20 broodmares. They form a gene pool for European Lipizzaner studs, as breeding was cut off from the rest of the world for a long time.
Besides Ivanovsky, all the other riders of the South African Lipizzaners were women. Some of the riders from the very beginning are Mietie von Hartesveldt, Margie Widman, Ann Sutton, Lynn Jarmen, Gill Meyer, Anne Webb, Ania Glintenkamp, Eva Sydow, Carol Kretzschmar, Maureen Quinn, Helen Dalgliesh and Valerie Welsh.
literature
- George Iwanowski: You and Your Horse. Shuter & Shooter, 1987, ISBN 0869859714 .
- George Iwanowski: The White Stallions of Kyalami. Purnell, Cape Town and New York 1977, ISBN 0868430013 .
Web links
- Official homepage (English) ( page no longer available )