Robert Bleichsteiner

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Prof. Robert Bleichsteiner was a noted ethnographer and anthropologist, whose fields of research and expertise were the Orient and the Caucasus.

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He was the Director of the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna, but his career had rather extraordinary beginnings, during the First World War: Bleichsteiner twice visited a prisoner-of-war camp (Kriegsgefangenlager Eger, in northern Bohemia), where he collected many myths, legends, songs, expressions, riddles, etc. among the Russian prisoners of war, particularly among those from the Caucasus. (This research was published as Gesänge Russischer Kriegsgefangener - the third volume deals exclusively with the Caucasus.)

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Bleichsteiner wrote many articles and books - on Georgia, Tibet, Caucasian languages, etc. - but surely his most unusual and amazing contribution to learning was the incredible Roßweihe und Pferderennen im Totenkult der kaukasischen Völker ("The Consecration and Racing of Horses in the Funerary Cults of the Peoples of the Caucasus"), which appeared in the fourth volume of the Wiener Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik ("Viennese Contributions to Cultural History and Linguistics"), published in Vienna in 1936.

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The saddled horse in the background awaits the soul of its deceased master to take him to Paradise.
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For more information on equestrian funerary cults and the roles played by horses during funerals, please go to these two previous posts: "A Batsbi Poem and Some Notes on Horses and Horsemanship" and "The Batsbi way of Death".

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