Tulpar

Tulpar is the war-horse in Kazakh and Kyrgyz; tolpar in Bashkir and Tatar, tulbar in the southern Altai. The word is absent from pre-thirteenth-century Turkic. Radloff's dictionary gives "war-horse" for Kazakh and Kyrgyz and, for the same word in the Altai dialects, "a poor nag"; the Kyrgyz dictionary's first sense is "myth. winged horse", its last a widow's word for her dead husband, "a hero".[3]

In the Kazakh epic of Koblandy the tulpar is born of an ordinary mare: Kurtka picks the blue-roan mare from the herd, the foal is born and named Burıl. It has "wings on its ribs", "twin wings in its armpits", and runs to war forty-three days short of full growth.[2] The Bashkir legends hold one hard rule: if the wings are seen, the horse dies. In the legend of Turat Sağılı the youth keeps his winged tolpar inside a tent by day, away from people's eyes; where it is seen, it lies down and dies.[1] By the Bashkir encyclopedia the first tulpars came out of the underwater world; their progenitor Akbuzat is the horse whose wingbeats raise a storm when it comes out of the lake.[1]

In the Altai epics the horse speaks, counsels and flies to the sky, but it is not called tulpar.[3] Anatolia has no such word at all; in Dede Korkut, Bamsı Beyrek says to his grey stallion, a sea-foal bought from merchants, "I do not call you horse, I call you brother, better than a brother."[4]