Tibor from Pettkó-Szandtner

Tibor von Pettkó-Szandtner (born June 20, 1886 in Pezinok , Slovakia; † January 6, 1961 in Leutstetten near Starnberg ) was a Hungarian general and breeding expert for thoroughbred Arabs and Shagya Arabs , as well as an outstanding personality of the Hungarian driving style. From 1932 to 1942 he was in charge of the Bábolna Stud in western Hungary and of the El Zahraa Stud in Egypt from 1952 to 1959 .

Life

Tibor von Pettkó-Szandtner was born in the then Hungarian Bazin as the son of a German Protestant-Reformed father and a Hungarian mother from an aristocratic Trenčín family. After attending school in Pozsony (now Bratislava ), he studied at the Georgikon in Keszthely because of his interest in horse breeding . Since 1916 Pettkó-Szandtner was married to Margarethe Sóos, whom he had met a year earlier. Their childless marriage remained stable.

After completing his studies, he worked on various studs, including the Kisbér stud . From 1920 to 1927 he was assigned to the commandant Colonel Arthur Hajnyi at the Bábolna Stud . He began by writing technical articles on the technique of correct driving with horses. In 1928 he came to the army foal farm near Kiskunlacháza south of Budapest . This is where his most important book on the past and present of the Hungarian art of driving was written, A magyar kocsizás (Driving the Hungarian way). In 1928 he was awarded the German driving badge in gold. In 1931 he achieved his greatest sporting success; he won the great marathon test Bad Ems - Aachen with his Hungarian four-in-hand.

In 1932 Pettkó-Szandtner, who had meanwhile been promoted to colonel, took over the command of the Bábolna stud. The stud farm was still structurally badly damaged by the consequences of the First World War . Therefore, he devoted himself very much to the renovation and restoration of the stud. The breeding stock in Bábolna was particularly enhanced by the purchase of the stallion Kuhailan Zaid , who was one of the last horses born directly from a nomadic tribe and was also acquired there by Carl Raswan .

Pettkó-Szandtner was able to continuously improve the international reputation of the stud through his commitment and skill. The quality and quantity of the thoroughbred Arabs and Shagya Arabs from Bábolna reached the high level of the pre-war years under his leadership. As early as 1933, Bábolna was the largest Arabian stud in Europe. In 1942 Pettkó-Szandtner was promoted to general and appointed to Budapest as the "Royal Hungarian Chief Equestrian". From now on he was responsible for all horse breeding in the country. His successor in Bábolna was Lieutenant Colonel Detlev von Arentschildt .

After large agricultural stocks perished in the course of the tank battles by the Red Army in 1944 , Pettkó-Szandtner tried to protect the breeding horse population that still existed in Hungary from the fighting. With the then State Secretary Pál Batta he agreed on the following procedure: One third of the breeding stock of the Bábolna and Kisbér studs remains in place, one third avoids the front and is housed on the western border of the country, while the last third goes to Bavaria is evacuated. Due to personal relationships and acquaintances of Pettkó-Szandtner, four freight trains with around 40 wagons were able to transport the most valuable horses from Bábolna to Bergstetten near Donauwörth in 1944 , where the around 400 horses were housed in an empty depot . At the end of 1944, Detlev von Arentschildt accompanied a small herd in a carriage from Kisbér to Bergstetten.

Problems arose, however, when, after the war, American officers of the occupying powers began to sell the horses cheaply. Moreover, were the former Behringwerke Arabian mares serum collection confiscated. However, by exchanging them for other horses, they could be regained. From December 1947 the 200 remaining horses were able to return to Bábolna.

Things were worse for Pettkó-Szandtner and his employees who came with him to Bavaria during the evacuation. For political reasons resulting from the flight to Germany, they were initially undesirable in post-war Hungary during the Sovietization of the country until 1949, and were no longer safe under the Stalinist dictatorship of Mátyás Rákosi 1949–1953. Pettkó-Szandtner and his wife spent the first post-war years at Dr Arvid Aaby Ericsson's private stud Gåvetorp near Alvesta in Sweden. His Hungarian sleigh can still be viewed in the local carriage museum.

In the spring of 1949 he received an offer from Mohamed Taher Pascha - the President of the Egyptian Royal Agricultural Society - to work for the royal stud farm Kafr Farouk near Cairo . He accepted the offer, but was initially only considered a personal guest and advisor to King Faruq , because Europeans in the Kingdom of Egypt did not like to be seen in management positions at this time. Pettkó-Szandtner only became the official head of the stud after the military coup in 1952 at the El Zahraa stud - the successor to Kafr Farouk's stud . From 1949 to 1952 he set up a modern horse breeding facility for thoroughbred Arabs in Egypt, which later became world-famous as the El Zahraa stud; The Bábolna stud served as a model for him. His breeding work in Egypt is considered revolutionary, and gained great fame in specialist circles because he also relied on the reimportation of Asil Arabs from large European stud farms. From the 1930s onwards, it was hard to find good thoroughbred Arabs in the Arab world. The stud book , handwritten by Pettkó-Szandtner , is still of great importance at the El Zahraa stud today. He worked in Egypt for ten years, where he was able to improve the quality of the horses so that they could again be increasingly sold to other European countries.

In 1959, Pettkó-Szandtner ended his work as a stud manager in El Zahraa and returned to Europe with his wife. Until his death in 1961 he lived at the stud farm SKH Ludwig Prinz von Bayern in a house of the Wittelsbach family in Leutstetten . He was buried in the Starnberg forest cemetery.

Works

• A magyar kocsizás (Driving the Hungarian Way) , 1931.

literature

• Schieler, Erika: Arabs in Europe , Munich 1967.

Web links

• Shagya magazine with a biography of Pettkó-Szandtner (PDF; 1.7 MB)
• Pettkó-Szandtner Tibor (Hungarian)
• General Tibor von Pettkó-Szandtner ...

Individual evidence

1. ↑ " Pettkó-Szandtner Tibor ( Memento of the original from October 30, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. " February 2012 
2. ↑ http://varendsbygder.se/artiklar/de-tre-gossarna-pa-gavetorp/
3. ↑ Erika Schieler: Arabs in Europe . Pp. 20 and 169ff.