Tulpar

When the horse ran, the ground gave up. Stones tore loose from the cliffs, the rivers went white along their banks, and behind the animal there was nothing to see but a standing column of dust. Bashkir singers described Akbuzat that way for generations, and Akbuzat was only the most celebrated of his kind. From the Southern Urals to the Tian Shan, Turkic storytellers used one word for the horse that carries a hero further than a horse should go: tulpar.

It is not one animal with a life story. It is a rank. Any steed can be born into it, and the epics award the title to whichever horse happens to be standing under the hero, which means the creature arrives in the record already plural: tolpar in Bashkir and Tatar, tūlpar in Kazakh, tulpar in Kyrgyz, with cousins scattered through Karakalpak, Uzbek and Uyghur telling. Wings come with the rank. So does the ability to talk.

The Bashkir epic Ural-batyr stops the story to inventory the animal, and the list is unusually exact for a creature nobody has ever bridled. Ears pricked sharp as awls and set like open scissors. A mane combed out hair by hair. Nostrils the size of a bucket, teeth like cloves of garlic, a gyrfalcon’s chest above narrow flanks, thin light legs beneath. The neck runs a full fathom and bends like a snake. The eyes get described twice, once as a falcon’s and an eagle’s, once as throwing off a copper sheen, and the horse rolls them sideways at everything it passes with the alertness of a wolf about to close. It chews the bit when it is angry and drops foam from its lips. When it goes, it goes upward, like a bird.

Akbuzat was born in the sky and raised there. He belongs to the Sun, and the Sun’s daughter Humay makes a gift of him to Ural-batyr, so the first horse a human being ever sat on came down out of the sky as a present. Fire will not burn him and water will not drown him. One blow of a hoof opens a mountain or splits a sea. He also does his own choosing: Humay wants the bravest, strongest and kindest batyr alive, and the horse goes out and finds him. When a flood rises to drown the world, Akbuzat plugs it at the source, then lays a road and a range of mountains across the open water. After his rider dies, he brings horses up onto the Ural range and leaves them grazing there.

Outliving your hero turns out to be a problem. In the second Bashkir epic, the one that carries the horse’s own name, Akbuzat is stolen after Ural-batyr’s death by Shulgen, the hero’s older brother and rival, who rules a kingdom under the water. The horse spends that poem in the service of a new man, Haubän, granting his wishes and lending him strength, and by then he has picked up a second office as lord of all livestock. He drives the herds up out of Lake Shulgan, horses and sheep and cattle in numbers nobody bothers to count, through the surface and onto dry ground.

Not every tulpar operates on that scale. In the Bashkir tale of Zayatulyak and Hyuhylu, the hero is his father’s favourite and comes home from every hunt with more game than his brothers, which is exactly the trouble; the older ones decide to kill him. The horse, which speaks and has generally worked out what its rider wants before he says it, simply takes him. It runs him clear of the camp and does not stop until the shore of Lake Aslykul. In another Bashkir story the black pacer Kara Yurga, leader of a herd that came up out of Lake Shulgan, is sent to fetch a girl who has run away from his master. He overtakes her, plays about in front of her until she cannot resist, stands still while she mounts, and carries her back.

The Kazakh epic Qobylandy Batyr gives its horse’s birth more attention than it gives the birth of some of its people. Qortqa, the hero’s wife, has foresight; riding past a herd she sees that one mare is carrying a foal that will grow into the right horse for her husband, and she raises it herself rather than pass the work to a servant. The foal is Taiburyl. Grown, he crosses six days of steppe in three hours and flies with his wings beating. Ibray Altynsarin took the poem down from the singer Marabai in the nineteenth century, one of twenty-nine recorded versions, which is worth remembering when the horse looks like a modern invention. It was being described out loud a long time before anyone wrote it down.

The Kyrgyz Manas gives its hero the stallion Ak-Kula and then kills him at the siege of Beijing. Manas mourns. What he says is that he has lost his wings, and in these poems that is close to a technical statement: the horse is usually the more sensible half of the partnership, it knows the safe road, it gives warnings, and the hero stays alive by listening.

Two of them stand in gold on the state emblem of the Republic of Kazakhstan, one to either side of the shanyrak, the crown of the yurt, against a blue field meant to read as the sky they gallop through. The official gloss makes the wings an image of the country’s ambition, and notes, with a farmer’s practicality, that they also resemble sheaves of grain. The horse skull nailed above a gate in a Bashkir village to keep the evil eye off the bees and the livestock belongs to the same long habit of mind.

The gifts follow from what the animal is, which is a creature of the sky lent out to the ground. Speech and counsel. Wind speed, enough to pull a rider out of a pursuit that should have caught him. The knack of disappearing and turning up somewhere else, and the older Bashkir material deserves precision here, because the popular retelling makes the wings invisible while the sources make the whole horse invisible. Fire and water do not hold them. Neither does the landscape, which comes apart behind them as they run.

The limits are the ones that come with being somebody’s horse. A tulpar can be stolen, as Shulgen stole Akbuzat, and its powers then serve whoever holds the halter. It can be killed, as Ak-Kula was killed, and the man who loses it is grounded for good. It is bound to a single rider and can choose one badly. And the tulpars go away. Some accounts have them surviving only in the descendants of the herds driven up out of Lake Shulgan and Lake Aslykul, ordinary horses now, carrying the blood quietly. Another says they rose and became two stars in Ursa Minor, which the Bashkirs call Sarat and Buzat, the grey horse and the yellow. Akbuzat still comes down now and then, when the spirit of Ural-batyr rides the border of the country to make sure no enemy has set foot on the Urals.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tulpar?

A tulpar is a winged horse of Turkic myth, found among the Bashkirs, Tatars, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz. It is a class of animal rather than one named individual, the title given to whichever steed carries the hero in an epic. Tulpars speak, run at the speed of the wind, and can vanish and reappear.

Is the tulpar the same as Akbuzat?

Akbuzat is the most famous individual tulpar rather than a separate creature. In the Bashkir epic Ural-batyr he is the horse of the Sun, given to the hero by the Sun’s daughter Humay, and he cannot be burned or drowned. A later Bashkir epic named after him describes how Shulgen stole him after Ural-batyr’s death.

Why do two tulpars appear on the emblem of Kazakhstan?

The state emblem of the Republic of Kazakhstan places two golden tulpars on either side of the shanyrak, the crown of a yurt, against a blue field standing for the sky. The official reading treats the horse as an old image of courage and the wings as the country’s aspiration, noting that the golden wings also resemble sheaves of grain.

Which epics does the tulpar appear in?

The tulpar runs through the major Turkic heroic epics. The Bashkir Ural-batyr and Akbuzat give it the most detail, the Bashkir tale of Zayatulyak and Hyuhylu has one rescue its rider from murderous brothers, the Kazakh Qobylandy Batyr describes the birth and rearing of Taiburyl, and the Kyrgyz Manas gives the hero Ak-Kula, whose death Manas calls the loss of his wings.

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