Turanian Horse

About the Friends of the Turanian Horse

The Friends of the Turanian Horse is a group of friends (of each other and of our horses) who have been sharing our information and love of all the hot-blooded breeds of the Turan Flats area to bring you this website. In case you'd like to know who we are and how we got involved in this...

Fara Marianne Shimbo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York and has been a horse-crazy kid since watching Racing from Aqueduct on Saturday afternoons with her grandfather. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science from Brooklyn College in 1976, and became a fan of the Akhal-Teke and the Turkoman after seeing a photo of Kambar. She now lives on a ranch (Moonshadow Farm) in Colorado with husband Bob, ten cats, three Great Pyrenees dogs, a variable number of ferrets and five horses: Chewbacca (nee Official Dude), a 32-year-old Thoroughbred Hunter; Moondancer, "The Brain-Dead Appy"; LMC Ellegraa, a Polish/Crabbet Arabian, LMC Candelaria, a National Show Horse mare, and latest addition, MV Katrina, a dark golden dun Akhal-Teke filly of 1998. Mrs. Shimbo specializes in dressage riding and has trained Chewie up to Grand Prix. For several years she worked with the Black-Footed Ferret Recovery Program, and has written numerous popular and technical books on the subject of ferrets both wild and domesticated. She is also an ASA licensed umpire. Mr. Shimbo currently works as a technical writer and potter, and maintains an exhaustive library on the variations of the horses of Turan and the peoples who lived and fought with them throughout the millennia.

Louise Laylin Firouz was born in 1933 in Washington DC, and earned a BA from Cornell University in New York in 1956. In 1957 she married Iranian prince Narcy Firouz and moved with him to Iran, where they started the Ghara Tepe Sheik Turkoman Stud. Since that time, Mrs. Firouz has become a world renowned authority on the Oriental Horse, and a list of guests at her Tehran home reads like a Who's Who of American and European royalty, nobility and diplomacy. Mrs. Firouz is perhaps best known for her discovery, in 1967, of Caspian Horse, a miniature horse thought to have become extinct about a thousand years ago, and recent blood work has shown that these tiny horses may in fact be ancestral to all the Oriental breeds. A mother of three, she now raises Caspian and Turkoman horses (45 in all) at her stud in Iran near the border with Turkmenistan, and lives, rides and races her horses with the Turkmen who share the area.

Bonnie L. Hendricks was born in 1940 in White Salmon, Washington. The family moved in '41 to Grand Coulee Dam, and later moved three miles North up the Columbia River to the Colville Indian Reservation. Bonnie grew up riding horseback with Indian friends, and spent much of her time helping the cowboys move cattle or help round up feral horses. The reservation is about ninty miles across with few fences, so it was a grand place to grow up with much open country and timbered areas. The area abounds with wildlife. Bonnie learned at a young age how to gentle a wild horse with gentle means, and has continued to work with feral horses all throuh her life. She started the American Buckskin Horse Registry Assn. in 1962 and was the Executive Secretary until 1971. She then resigned and started the International Buckskin Registry Assn. (which was later changed to International Buckskin Horse Assn.) which she turned over to competent people in Indiana after about one year. Both associations have continued to grow. Bonnie is the author of the book "International Encyclopedia of Horse Breeds" published by the University of Oklahoma Press in Norman, Oklahoma. She is an artist and has lately taken an interest in clay sculpture. Her deep interest in horses led her to write the above mentioned encyclopedia. Over a twenty year period Bonnie has gathered information about the Akhal-Teke breed and other horses closely related to it, believing that this horse is the root of all hot blood in horses today, along with the blood of the Caspian.