Tarpan (Equus ferus ferus), the ancestor of all horse breeds in Europe was, since ancient times, an inhabitant of the territory where today is Romania. The fossil remains speak of wild horse hunting since the early Paleolithic.
The surprise comes from the Neolithic period, when evidence is discovered that the horse was already domesticated in the area between the Tisa, the Danube and the Black Sea. The Dacians both hunted and honored wild horses, many equine fossils being discovered in the tombs of Candesti, Socodor, Varsand, Barlad, Piatra-Neamt, Zimnicea, Matasaru and many others. During the Romanian Middle Ages, a series of very interesting proofs appear to us.
For example, between 1551-1552, on the domains of Fagaras fortress was built a special park for keeping wild horses captured in the surroundings. The Romanian King of Hungary, Matei Corvin, recalls in his work Rerum Hungaricarum Decadens, written in 1495, that in the forests of Transylvania, along with aurochs and bison, there are wild forest horses.
After 1700, the wild horses from Transylvania are killed to the last specimen in the hunts of the Hungarian and Saxon nobles, as the text Nova Dacia, written in 1743 by Francis Fasching, recalls. However, at the level of 1700, in Moldova there were still large herds of wild horses that lived along the banks of the Prut and Dniester, as Dimitrie Cantemir assures us.
In the seventeenth century other documents mention about the last herd of wild horses in the Baragan Ialomitei, so that a century later, tarpan to disappear permanently from the Roman lands. The sad story of European wild horses does not end there. In the XIX century, the Cossacks, Tatars and Russian peasants were chasing and hunting with reversion tarpans, because their own domestic horses ran away and resalbaticat next to the tarpans.
Once recovered, they already had the wild character of their relatives, being so aggressive that they would destroy the hooves with hoof blows and bite anyone who tried to ride them. The last tarpan died in captivity in the steppes of Askania Nova in Ukraine. It was 1876. Sad end for a magnificent animal that lived in medieval Europe from Spain and France to central Russia.
