By Tobi Lopez Taylor
As the owner and caretaker of four horses, I’ve long divided
my work life and social life into five-hour increments. I feed at 7 AM, at
noon, and at 5 PM, and I do what I call a “bed check” at 10 PM. In the summer,
I ride for part of the first increment, and write or edit until 5 PM, and in
the fall, winter, and spring, I tend to work during the first increment and
ride in the afternoon. Somewhere in between the writing and the riding is the
daily ritual of mucking stalls while listening to NPR.
I should pause here to say that in general, I find cleaning stalls to be a rather meditative activity, provided the stall hasn’t been completely trashed, like your typical frat house bathroom. Three of my horses are what I call “tidy cats” — they inhabit stalls with outside runs, and clearly view the stalls as places to eat and sleep, with the runs functioning as open-air outhouses. However…my fourth horse, the lovely Rose, is as piggish as she is beautiful. She can turn a freshly bedded stall into an ASPCA horse-care nightmare in mere hours.
Rose is Arabian horse royalty, and she knows it. She’s one
of the last granddaughters of the Polish stallion Orzel (“eagle,” in Polish)—who
was nicknamed the “Arabian Secretariat” for his exploits on the racetrack, his
large size (nearly 16 hands), his chestnut coat and flashy white markings, and
his undeniable charisma. Unlike the many descendants of Orzel who inherited his
size, color, and speed, Rose appears to be a throwback to a previous
generation—she resembles Orzel’s dam, Ofirka, a small bay mare who also
happened to be a witness to some of the worst days of World War II.
Ofirka was foaled at Poland’s Janow Podlaski Stud in the spring of 1939, a pivotal year that would see Poland ransacked first by Germany and then by the Soviet Union.
Ofirka—at that time an unnamed filly—was part of the young
stock thought to be lost during that evacuation. The “loss” of Ofirka was actually
a stroke of luck for Polish breeders, however. Upon the group’s return to
Janow, many of the horses were confiscated by the Soviets, to be used in the
breeding program at Tersk Stud. These included Ofirka’s sire, her dam Fryga II,
her full sister Wesola, and her two half sisters Maskota and Nirwana. Ofirka
herself was not located until 1941, when she was finally found on a farm in
Volynhia. It’s said that when the Polish inspector Adam Sosnowski finally
rediscovered this small, malnourished filly, he exclaimed “Ofirka!”—
meaning “Ofir’s daughter!”—since she so greatly resembled her famous sire, and
that epithet became her registered name.
In late October 1939, the Germans wrested control of Janow
from the Soviets, and the stud’s breeding program recommenced in 1940. Ofirka’s
first foal was born in 1944, when she was five years old. That summer, during
the Soviet offensive, the Janow horses were evacuated west, to southern Saxony,
in Germany. Then, in early February 1945, the horses were scheduled to be moved
again, this time to Torgau, in northern Saxony. The route they were slated to
take happened to go directly through the city of Dresden. On February 13, 80
stallions from Janow were led into Dresden and were walking through the middle
of the city when the first firebombing began. Although most of the stallions died
or were lost, among the survivors were Ofirka’s paternal half brothers Witraz
and Wielki Szlem, whose groom, Jan Ziniewicz, held tight to their lead ropes as
incendiary bombs exploded around them.
Ofirka and the other mares, as well as their foals and young
stock, spent the night on the road outside Dresden, in the driving snow. They
were marched through the city the next day. What was left of Janow’s horses trekked
to Tornau, and then to Holstein, where they stayed until the fall of 1946. That
year, the horses finally returned to Janow, where the stud began a new chapter
in its Arabian breeding program, in which Ofirka would play an important role.
Roman Pankiewicz, former manager of Poland’s Albigowa Stud,
wrote this about Ofirka: “[She] was small (probably as a result of her wartime
rearing), but had a strikingly handsome head and great refinement. Her
spectacular Arabian type and golden-bay colour clearly showed the stamp of her
sire, the celebrated Ofir.” Ofirka’s great-granddaughter Rose is herself a bay
of a particularly golden hue, especially in the summertime.
But back to NPR and cleaning stalls. One weekend, I was
cleaning Rose’s stall a bit later than usual, so I caught a show I don’t
normally hear, Ask Me Another. Listening to the show's hosts, including Ophira Eisenberg, I wondered, what kind of name is Ophira, anyway? And
does it have anything to do with Ofir and Ofirka? After a bit of research, I can say that the answer is a qualified yes. The name Ophira is related
to the Biblical place name Ophir, known as place of riches; there are said to be several references in
the Bible to “the gold of Ophir.” In addition, the translation of the Polish name Ofir is,
not surprisingly, Ophir. Was the name of Ofirka’s father a play on words? For a
stallion as golden as Ofir, the name makes eminent sense. After all, the Poles surely
know the Gypsy expression that a horseman’s gold does not clink and glitter; it
gleams in the sun and neighs in the dark. It also, I might add, needs its stall cleaned every day, preferably while listening to NPR.
