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COURSERS OF EASTERN EUROPE
By David Hancock

  In The Graphic of the 22nd of February 1873, there is an appreciation of the great Polish animal painter Julius Kossak, born 1824, accompanied by two sketches taken from his work and showing a brace of Chart Polski, the Polish sighthound, in the coursing field. The illustrations are preceded by the words: "In spite of her political misfortunes, Poland adheres with chivalric devotion to her traditions, customs, and general habits. Consequently rural life there is eminently national; the gentry, especially, maintain a highly chivalrous spirit, with a slight touch of Oriental enthusiasm. They are passionately fond of hunting..." Can you imagine those words being used in a national paper or magazine today? If any contemporary writer wrote to associate chivalry with field sports - he or she wouldn't get much printed! And there's little evidence of today's gentry being passionate about all the various forms of hunting. Noblesse no longer oblige! I once showed a member of the 'new aristocracy' a copy of the rules and regulations on coursing and he was astonished. In his coverage of rural sport in Poland, Kossak strove to depict the simple pageantry and the respect for quarry once obtained in field sports all over Europe.

  The Chart Polski or Polish Greyhound was originally developed as a strongly-built courser for use on a wide rage of quarry - wolf, deer, fox and hare. With its feathered tail it has the slight look of the Saluki about it. Like so many sporting breeds in Eastern Europe it only just survived two World Wars and the political unrest after them. But once their lack of numbers was acknowledged, a dedicated band of enthusiasts tracked down around 100 of them and a breeding programme ensued. Watching them at World Dog Shows, the one in Vienna especially, they reminded me of old prints of the so-called Circassian Greyhound, never recognised as a distinct breed but a type influencing other coursers in the region. The Circassian people came from the Caucasus but had settlements in Iraq and Syria, with strong links between these locations - and their hunting dogs.

   The Magyar Agar, or Magyarorszag, is around 55lbs and 26” high, coming in all the sighthound colours, with a short coarse coat. They are used on hare and foxes, sometimes kept as pot-fillers by shepherds. Racing Greyhounds have also been imported for track racing there in recent years and crossed with local coursing hounds. Stronger-headed than our greyhound, resembling our Greyhound lurchers, interest in the breed in its native land led to recognition as a breed internationally in 1966. I have seen them at World Dog Shows, especially the Budapest one, becoming more uniform but sadly judged purely on appearance. Hungary was invaded by the Turks in the thirteenth century; invading armies brought their hunting dogs with them. It is understandable for countries with wide open spaces, like the prairies, the steppes, the plains of the Puszta, as well as the desert, to have coursing hounds. In the more heavily wooded terrain of Western Europe the preference for scenthounds is logical.

  The Magyar Agar of Hungary may have been introduced by the invading Magyars, from the steppes of Russia, in the ninth century. Coursing hounds were also brought into both Hungary and Poland at the time of the Kievan Russian empire, which by 1030AD had formed the largest federation in Europe. The Mongols reached both Hungary and Poland in 1206-59AD invasions, no doubt bringing their hunting dogs with them. Ottoman armies passing through Hungary towards Vienna on the various invasions of that area in the period 1328-1683AD, would have been accompanied by their coursers. Trading in valuable hunting dogs, and parading them, especially by nomads or migrants is timeless. An Englishman, William Blaine, attended a hunting expedition of the Grand Vizier of the Mongol Empire in India in 1785, and listed 300 ‘Greyhounds’ and well over 200 hawks as part of the entourage.

    In his informative Observations on Borzois written in 1912 and published by Houghton Mifflin, the American Joseph B Thomas states: “It seems sure that all breeds of Russian Borzoi came from one common root, namely, from the crossing of the Asiatic or Eastern Borzoi, which penetrated into Russia some hundreds of years ago, with the Northern wolf-like dogs, or even perhaps with the wolf itself. This is proved by the ears and by the long hair on the neck. The Courland Borzoi seems also to have added its blood to the breed and given to it the long, curly hair.” Courland was a Baltic province of Russia. He referred to The Hunter’s Calendar and Reference Book of 1892 that listed a dozen Asiatic Borzoi types, ranging from Caucasian or mountain and Turkomenian to Crimean and Kirghiz Borzois (Taigons). The list included the Moldavian Borzoi and, under the Hortoy type, the Polish Borzoi. The Chart Polski or Polish Greyhound and the Magyar Agar or Hungarian Greyhound are still with us and the new meritocracy in Russia seems to be reviving the hunting Borzoi. We know little of the Chortaj or West Russian Coursing Hound or Eastern Greyhound and the Steppe Borzoi or South Russian Steppe Hound (Tazi), both smooth-coated 26" sighthounds. The latter is the courser of the Rostovskaya area, lacks the heavier Borzoi coat and is known locally as the Stepnaya Barzaya. But wherever the coursing dogs originate or are utilised, they present the same silhouette: a long-legged, slenderly-constructed, keen-eyed, long-backed canine athlete; the type is universal, but the sport is fast disappearing.

    In the copy of The Graphic referred to at the start of this piece there are two complete pages devoted to the coursing at Altcar at that time; at that meet there was subsequent comment that more hares got away than were caught, protected by the rules of coursing. That month, another sporting magazine reported on a 'successful' hare shoot on a nearby estate in which over 100 hares had been shot in two days. Hare shoots continue, coursing does not!