01 A horse named after an oasis
Physically it is a long, narrow horse, very unlike the European model. It stands between 144 and 160 centimetres at the withers and weighs 430 to 500 kilos: little mass for that height. The neck is long and comes almost vertically out of the chest, the skin is thin, and the whole has more the air of a greyhound than of a draught horse.
The coats break down like this: around 40% are bays, 22% duns, 12% blacks and 11% chestnuts; the rest divides among greys, creams and yellows. That proportion matters for what comes next, because the effect the breed is famous for shows above all on the pale coats.
02 The sheen
The Akhal-Teke's coat frequently has a metallic sheen, and on dun-coated individuals that sheen produces a golden effect unlike any other horse's. It is not light bouncing off a clean coat: it is a property of the fibre, and it shows in the stable as much as in the sun.
The exact optical mechanism is not established. It has been suggested that it served as desert camouflage, but that is a hypothesis, not a finding.
03 1935: Ashgabat to Moscow
The endurance test that fixed the breed's reputation took place in 1935. A group of Turkmen riders set out from Ashgabat for Moscow and covered some 4,000 kilometres in 84 days. That gives an average of a little under 48 kilometres a day, sustained for nearly three months.
But the figure always cited, and rightly, is the desert stretch: 378 kilometres in three days without water. That is an average of 126 kilometres a day over sand, with the animal not drinking. Anyone who has ridden understands what that line means.
The desert around the city justifies that capacity. The Karakum covers 350,000 square kilometres, around 70% of the country's territory, receives between 70 and 150 millimetres of rain a year and has a population density of one person per 6.5 square kilometres. A horse bred there either endures thirst or does not get bred at all.
04 How many are left
Today there are around 6,600 Akhal-Tekes in the world. That is a small number for so well-known a breed. They break down like this: some 3,000 in Turkmenistan, some 1,600 in Russia, some 1,300 in Western Europe, some 450 in the United States and some 300 across the rest of Central Asia.
The studbook was closed in 1932 and formally printed in 1941, with 287 stallions and 468 mares. A closed book means no outside blood enters: the entire population today descends from those seven hundred and fifty-five animals, and that explains both the uniformity of the type and the genetic problems the breed carries.
One last precision, for honesty's sake: you often read that the Akhal-Teke is "the oldest horse in the world" or that it descends directly from this or that extinct breed. None of that is demonstrated. What is documented is what it does: the anatomy of an extreme distance runner, bred over centuries in the strip of oases where a marble capital now stands.
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Adam Harangozó TashkentUntil 2018 it was forbidden to photograph this metro.
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