I want to follow up on the previous blog entry about the 2010 magazine article about the horses of the USA expat families working for the oil company Aramco and living in the Abqaiq gated community, in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia. I am specifically interested in this reference from the article: “More horses arrived when Ibrahim Abu Boutain, the agriculture minister, presented Abqaiq with seven of his fine Arabians. [Four of the seven] were sired by the famous Balalil, a foundation stallion for the Tunisian National Stud.” I am not aware of a “famous Balalil, a foundation stallion for the Tunisian National Stud“, which would be Sidi Thabet. If this piece of information turned out to be correct, it could either mean the Saudis gave the Tunisians this stallion, or less likely at that time, that the Tunisians gave the Saudis one of their stallions. This is a matter for further investigation. However, there was an Arabian stallion by the name of Balabil (with a “b” not an “l”) racing in Beirut in the late 1940s or early 1950s in the ownership of Prince Badr Aal Saud, a son of King ibn Abd al-Aziz Al Saud. This Balabil…
Some two years ago, Jenny Krieg located this interesting article in a magazine for Aramco US expatriates to Saudi Arabia. It has a lot of photos which the Arabian horse community had not seen before. Among these is the cover photo (below) of the magazine featuring the famous mare Sindidah, ridden by a young “Aramcon” near the Abqaiq gated community in 1958. The article chronicles the memories and adventures of Aramco horse-riding families tfrom the late 1940s through the 1960s. These families were typically interested in riding and enjoying the horses with their children, and caress less about the origins and provenance of their horses, other than these “having a royal connection” or coming “from the Bedouin”. A few horses are named for their strains: Kuhaylan, Hamdani, Obayya. The second part of the article is here. It features a photo of Jalam (mispelled Jamal) Al Ubayyan never seen before.