Daughters of the Wind: a blog on desert arabian horses, past and present

The book these pictures come from was published in the Hungarian language in 1904 and was translated  into Arabic language in 2004 by Mr. Tha’er Saleh with the support of the Hungarian Translation Fund. The original photos are at the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture in Budapest. The book is about the travels of Austro-Hungarian government envoy Fadlallah Mikhail el-Haddad to the Arabian desert just a few years before the trip Homer Davenport took there.

The purpose of the trip of Mikhail el Haddad to Ottoman Iraq (Mesopotamia) was apparently to access alternative sources of desert blood than the ‘Anazah blooflines that Babolna already had access to. His trip first followed the Damascus-Palmyra-Deir-ez-Zor axis, then it followed the Euphrates valley to down to Fallujah  and Baghdad. From there, Haddad went along a large circular route south of Bagdad that included Najaf, Kerbala, the ‘Amarat Bedouin (a branch of the ‘Anazah) pastures and then crossed the Euphrates river eastwards until he reached the Tigris river.

From top to bottom, and left to right: Photo 1: In Tell Kalakh, which is west the city of Homs (my mother’s town by the way) in Syria, with Abdallah Agha al-Dandashi from whom the stallion O’Bajan was bought in 1885; photo 2: with some ‘Anazah Bedouins, top, and at the Sultan stables at”Al Waziria” near Bagdad, bottom; photo 3: the mare Ferha of the Shammar; photo 4: Mikhail’s three uncles, all Maronite clergymen in Beit Shebab, in the Mountains of Lebanon.