All month long we will be featuring speaker’s abstracts for the upcoming Equine History Conference: Why Equine History Matters.
Lotnik: A Narrative History of an American Prize of War and Polish Lost Treasure
Andra Kowalczyk Martens, Independent Scholar
“A man without a horse is like a body without a soul.”
-Old Polish proverb
Only a people deeply familiar with the fracture of body-soul wholeness could conceive this poignant intuition. In the collective spirit of Poland, horses are intrinsic to the human experience. The insight invites an exploration of significant historical events and their effects through the profound horse-human kinship of Polish tradition. Specifically, what happens when the bond is broken, when a horse loses all association to his human and homeland?
The proposed narrative follows the story of an individual Arabian horse of pre-World War II Poland that became separated from his historical and cultural connections. Named Lotnik, this stallion’s story traverses continents and decades. Lotnik’s unique tale threads together an incredible collection of owners, keepers, takers, seekers, finders, admirers, and persons of interest. In his twenty-five years, Lotnik was anticipated as a promising racehorse by his breeder, looted by the Russian aggressor, commandeered and assimilated by Nazi eugenicists, cherry-picked as a prize of war by the U.S. Army Remount Service, extolled by esteemed horsemen in Europe and America, maligned by xenophobic American horse breeders, auctioned as surplus Army goods, cherished by his new owner, entangled by divorce paper verbiage, forgotten as a workhorse, and finally re-discovered as a lost treasure. Yet even then, Lotnik’s reality never synched with his birthright. As a splintered half of the Polish proverb, Lotnik instead provides an eclectic series of snapshot moments of mid-20th century history through ever-changing settings, environments, and cultures.