Now if there is one Arabian mare that needs no introduction, it’s *Turfa. Ever since her importation by Henri Babson to the USA in 1941, almost seventy years ago, this pretty Kuhaylah mare has continued to embody the ideal desert-bred Arabian mare. Her famous picture trotting in the snow-covered paddocks of the Babson Farm (below) was a constant source of fascination for me, as I was growing up. In the 1980s, asil Arabians tracing to *Turfa were a major building block of Al Khamsa, and a quick glance at one of the ads which breeders of *Turfa-bred horses placed in books like Al Khamsa Arabians (1983) suffices to convince one of the popularity of this bloodline back then. *Turfa-bred horses were athletic, had good disposition and looked like classic Arabian horses of the first order. The *Turfa blood was to be found mainly — but not exclusively — in combination with Babson Egyptian bloodlines, horses tracing to Babson lines with the addition of the stallion Sirecho (Nasr x Exochorda by Aiglon), and in many combinations within the BLUE STAR group of horses. Stallions looked especially attractive: Fa-Turf, Ibn Fadl, Dhahran (photo below, note the resemblance with his grand-dam above, he…