Lipizzaner Stallions Victims Of Civil War -- More Than 100 Show Horses Killed Or Disappear

LIPIK, Croatia - Favory Trompeta XXI was exhumed early this year from the mass grave in the village of Filipovac where he had been buried with 13 other members of his illustrious family. Some had been stabbed, others shot.

An international commission headed by Sir George Stephen, a member of Queen Elizabeth's guard, and John Wilson, a pathologist attached to the royal household, found death was due to suffocation by smoke.

Favory was a horse - not any old horse but a Lipizzaner stallion, one of those poised, arch-necked creatures that have trotted around dressage and circus arenas to the delight of generations.

His harem was impressive among the 118 members of his breed stabled at the Lipik stud.

The stables are empty now, the walls scarred by machine-gun fire, the tiled red roof perforated by missiles from MiG fighter jets. The whereabouts of most of the 118 horses that were stabled here - "the best Lipizzaners in Europe" - is unknown, as are their meticulously kept birth certificates.

Yugoslavia's merciless ethnic war did not spare these Croatian horses, nor did it spare another 14,000 horses of less noble descent. All died during hostilities that overlooked the nation's long equestrian tradition.

Around Lipik, the corpses of 35 Lipizzaners have been found so far. Most of them, panicked by the bombardment of their stables last Sept. 28-30, kicked their way to freedom, only to be shot in the paddocks. The rest have vanished without trace.

Some local Croatians believe the horses were taken into Serb-held territory and are now being hidden until the day someone can start a Serbian stud farm with them. Others are convinced the horses were killed in a frenzy of vengeance and bulldozed into mass graves.

Against the Croatian conviction that the massacre was an act of Serbian barbarity, there are those who point out the stud farm was run by a Serbian manager and only 18 of the 270 employees were Croatians, the rest Serbs.

"A few of us managed to turn loose some of the animals as the stables burned," said Slavko Vulinovic, a stable repairman who stayed behind when all but five of the employees fled.

The stable complex is 170 yards long and 10 yards deep. Its fate is yet another chapter in the turbulent history of Lipizzaner breeding since it began in the 14th century.

Disease and wars decimated the breed periodically, but enough horses were always left to start a stud farm again somewhere else.

The Lipik stud farm was founded in 1938 and was the one in Europe to breed dark Lipizzaners, all descendants of a famed black stallion, Tulipan Maradhat, born in 1925. His progeny flourished here until the war began last summer.

"This area became the center of the war zone," said Vulinovic, who still lives in the damaged administrative building. "We couldn't transport the horses to safety, and we thought it was safer for them inside the stables rather than let them run around the countryside, where there was fighting everywhere. We never thought the stables would be hit."

Some 200 Lipizzaners at stud farms in Lipice (from which the word Lipizzaner is derived) in Slovenia and Djakovo in Croatia were evacuated to sites elsewhere in Yugoslavia and to Hungary and Austria late last year to avoid the fate of those killed in Lipik.

The horses were originally bred for the Hapsburg rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The world-famous Spanish Riding School in Vienna, which features them in the traditional school of performance known as dressage, now breeds its own.