About Us

It all started four years ago in June, when we spent a few days with the children in the Vrtoče ethno village in BH. We loved it. And so I suggested to my husband that we buy a Nonius foal for the children so that we would have a reason to go there more often. We bought little Luna.

And since we had no experience with horses, my husband started researching and that’s how our interest in our native breed, the Bosnian Mountain Horse, came about. We were particularly interested in the fact that the breed was literally on the verge of extinction.

We soon bought a mare and a stallion of this breed, but little did we know that we would soon become the world’s largest breeders of the Bosnian mountain horse,” says Azra Bekić, a sociologist who is now also a licensed partner of the international equine training organization HorseDream is, in her story.

The action to save the Bosnian mountain horse took serious shape when the Bekićs heard about the Borike stud farm, which was about to close after 127 years of operation and was directly subordinate to the Austro-Hungarian government.

Later it passed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and still later, in the SFRY, the breeding of the high-quality Bosnian mountain horse and the Boriker Arabian was continued in this stud. Unfortunately, the situation has been very problematic since the 1990s because the system did not take sufficient care of the stud farm and its horses.

Eventually we got the information that horses, this great jewel of our society, were disappearing from the stud farm and that the rest were in a very critical condition. We learned that they were starving and that there was no support from the surrounding population, making it difficult for them to survive the winter of 2018/19. That is why we decided in 2019 to buy the remaining 22 high-quality but emaciated Bosnian mountain horses and get them out of the Borike Stud.

By moving them to the Čardaklije farm in the village of Vrtoče near Bosanski Petrovac, owned by farmer Zoran Radošević, we saved the horses with his help and ensured their further reproduction and survival. I can proudly say that today we have almost 50 animals in the Bosnian Mountain Horse stud farm and that this number continues to increase through selective breeding,” emphasizes the well-known businessman Amir Bekić, founder and managing director of the Adriatic Group GmbH. With the purchased horses, the Bekić couple came into possession of extensive and valuable documentation proving the origin and qualities of this breed.

“For decades, highly qualified horse breeders worked at the Borike stud farm, stud books were kept and the structures from the Austro-Hungarian period were preserved. Thanks to this careful system, each of our horses has its pedigree going back up to eight generations, which greatly facilitates the scientific study of the Bosnian mountain horse, about which famous international horse breeding experts have already written many books. Our idea is that we continue the so-called selective breeding, which means that we respect the pedigree of each individual animal so that inbreeding does not occur, which would affect the genetic material of these specimens and their offspring.

As for the specimens that experts classify as high-quality animals, we try to obtain offspring of the highest quality through certain crossings, so that this breed can not only survive, but also evolve and gain new respect around the world,” says Ms. Azra Voller Enthusiasm. From the way the couple Bekić talk about the Bosnian mountain horse, it is easy to conclude that the project was not only dear to their hearts out of material interest. Because they are rescuing a treasure that belongs to our region, and to a large extent from their own resources.

“The Bosnian mountain horse is the only living breed that carries the genes of the Przewalski wild horse, which has also been scientifically proven. This is the oldest autochthonous breed in the Balkans and belongs to the mountain ponies, is about 140 cm tall and weighs about 300 kg.

In the stud farm of the Bekić couple there is a line of stallions and mares in which the blood of Arabian horses was crossed about seven generations ago. But that only applies to a smaller number, while most have proven that each of their ancestors was a purebred Bosnian mountain horse. This quality is rarely found in the world, no matter what breed it is.

“Today there are four living lines among the stallions. Two lines are called Miško and Barut. They originated in Borike and have existed for decades. The Miško line is the oldest, it dates from 1932, Barut from 1934. Colleagues Dolinšek and Žiga bred two lines of their own: Durmitor and Đulbeg. These are four lines of stallions that all live with us. As far as the female mare families are concerned, we have nine lines out of a total of fifteen, and in the future we will manage to include all the others in our stud.

In their long-term plans, the Bekićs plan to expand the existing stud farm to two or three locations in BH, because they expect that the number of horses from this breeding center will eventually reach three digits.
“Our wish, which we are working very hard to realize, is also to move some of the horses to Austria and to start this project here as well. Because in history there were already many connections between the Austrian state and the Bosnian mountain horse when Bosnia was still part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

There are extensive documents in the Austrian archives from the time of the First World War in which leading military experts state that they could not have imagined the course of the war without our Bosnian mountain horse. During this period, horses were very important factors on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. The Bosnian horse played an important role in logistics, the transport of soldiers and wounded, food and everything else, and on the western front battles sometimes took place at 2,000 m above sea level.

There are two reasons for transferring part of the stud farm to Austria. One is that we want to continue working on the selective breeding of the Bosnian mountain horse under the conditions of a regulated system and precise process monitoring. On the other hand, my wife would be committed in her professional work to bringing this valuable and good creature closer not only to the people from our region, but also to the Austrians. In her projects, she will show how much we can all learn from horses, and that is much more than the horses learn from us,” Amir Bekić explains his plans to us.