How unpredictable life is - your parents give you the "herbal" name Florian, and you decide to work in animal taxidermy. I think about it while Slavko Spasić, director of the Natural History Museum in Belgrade, drives me towards Subotica, where one of our most skilled taxidermists lives. The word "taxidermy" has its roots in ancient Greek and in translation means "dressing the skin".
Fans of European cinematography must have heard of the film Taxidermy, a very unusual and multiple award-winning 2006 Hungarian director György Palfi, in three stories about a grandfather, father and son - a paramedic, a top athlete and a taxidermist, with different ambitions - one wants love, the other fame, and the third immortality. The film received numerous awards at European festivals.
photo: Robert Choban…and Florian Horvat
We arrive at Florian Horvath's house, which is located at the end of town, on the very edge of the sandbar and the forest. Florian's little daughter greets us in front of the wooden gate and greets us in Hungarian. I saw a "play house" in the crown of a tree in the yard. The big wolf seems peaceful, but we still wait for the owner of the house to lead us into the yard. We enter Florian's workshop: "The wallaby is finished, you can take it to Belgrade!", our host shows Slavka a stuffed white wallaby kangaroo originating from New Guinea, which recently died in the zoo in Belgrade.
Namely, when an animal dies in the zoos in Belgrade and Palić or in one of the national parks, the authorities are obliged, according to the provisions of the Law on Nature Protection, to inform the Natural History Museum in Belgrade. At the museum, they then make a decision on whether the deceased animal undergoes taxidermy, after which it will become one of the exhibits, or whether it is cremated in a standard cremation procedure. There is also a third possibility, which is "dismemberment", more precisely, the separation and cleaning of the animal's skeleton, which also becomes a museum exhibit. This happened last summer when the elephant Twiggy died in the ZOO in Belgrade at the age of 58. Her body was handed over to the Veterinary Institute for autopsy (necropsy), after which, due to the high temperatures and the large size of the dead animal, it was decided in the Natural History Museum that there were no conditions for taxidermy, so skeleton experts from Kragujevac came and separated the bones of the elephant from the rest of the body, cleaned them, conserved and they will be connected with wires and fittings to form one of the exhibits in the future new building of the Natural History Museum, which, as the authorities promised, should be ready for the opening of the Expo 2027 event.
Now, apart from a small gallery on Kalemegdan where very interesting exhibitions are often organized, the Natural History Museum in Belgrade does not have an exhibition space where visitors could see the real treasures that are in its depots. During a recent visit, I saw a kiwi bird from New Zealand that a professor gave as a gift in 1934, a caiman that was stolen from the Belgrade Zoo and the police found it stuffed and returned it to Vuk Bojović and he returned it to the museum because "they don't keep stuffed animals"; I saw hundreds of steppe bison skulls from the Ice Age that were sold to the museum by an excavator from the vicinity of Smederevo; mammoth jaws, as well as the flamingo bird that was shot in Obedska Bara by King Alexander in 1925.
By the way, in Serbia, according to the Rulebook on the determination of jobs that are considered old and artistic crafts, taxidermy and stuffing of birds and animals are classified as old crafts.
Florian Horvath learned it from Janos Greguš from Palić, an old master of this craft. It is said that stuffed animals used to be stuffed with straw, but today modern materials and chemicals are used. Taxidermy masters buy "forms" in Austria, these are "bodies" for stuffed animals that are made of a material similar to foam, in three sizes - L, XL and XXL and in several different poses.
Florian worked for years at the National Museum in Subotica, where he created one of the best natural history collections in the country. He tells us about the real war that lasted in the woods around his house until a few months ago, about the conflicts between Afghan and Syrian migrants, in which there were many more victims than officials told us through the media. The forest was full of migrant corpses that were being eaten by wild animals.
photo: Robert ChobanWALLABIES FROM THE PALIĆ ZOO: The work of Florian Horvat
With the stuffed wallaby in the trunk, we continue in the direction of Bačka Topola, where Valerija Nemet is waiting for us, who, along with Florian, is one of the best taxidermists in Serbia. Along the way, I tell Slavko Spasić about the famous "Deyrolle" store in Paris, which I first heard about in the movie Midnight in Paris Woody Allen. This unusual place has existed since 1831, and at the beginning of the 20th century it was a favorite among surrealists such as the painter Salvador Dali and the writer Andre Breton, it has a large collection of various stuffed animals, many of which are for sale.
Slavko explains to me how animal embalming has been practiced since ancient times - embalmed animals were found with Egyptian mummies. In the 19th century, hunters brought their trophies to upholsterers' shops where the upholsterers actually sewed animal skins together and stuffed them with rags and cotton. More sophisticated cotton-wrapped wire bodies soon followed, supporting stitched dried hides. In France at the end of the 18th century, Louis Dufresne, a preparator at the Museum of Natural History, popularized arsenic soap, which enabled the museum to build the largest collection of birds in the world.
Dufresne's methods spread to England in the early 19th century where non-toxic methods were improved and developed by the leading naturalists of the day, including Rowland Ward and Montague Brown. Ward founded one of the earliest taxidermy firms, however, the art remained relatively undeveloped and the specimens created remained stiff and unreliable.
English ornithologist John Hancock is considered the father of modern taxidermy. An avid collector of birds that he would shoot himself, he began to model them in clay and cast them in plaster. For the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, he set up a series of stuffed birds as an exhibit and aroused great public and scholarly interest. The golden age of taxidermy occurred during the Victorian era when stuffed animals became a popular part of interior design and decoration, which was then called the "Victorian fad." Even Queen Victoria amassed an impressive collection of birds. Dissection was also increasingly used by grieving owners of dead pets to "resurrect" them. In the late 19th century, a style known as anthropomorphic taxidermy became popular – stuffed animals dressed as humans or depicted as engaging in human activities. An early example of this genre was exhibited by Hermann Ploke of Stuttgart, Germany, at the Great Exhibition in London.
In the early 20th century, taxidermy flourished and famous artists included Carl Akele, James L. Clark, William T. Hornaday, Coleman Jones and others. These masters developed anatomically accurate figures with every detail incorporated, in artistically interesting poses, in realistic settings and poses that were deemed appropriate for the species.
We arrive in Bačka Topola, where there is a "Karakal Taxidermy studio" in Josipa Kraša Street, owned by Valentina Nemet, a young woman with a fragile build who few would think is engaged in such an unusual and difficult craft.
"I don't do fish! I know how to make fish, but I don't make them!", Valentina, who specializes in mammals, tells us. In addition to the animals he receives for taxidermy from the Natural History Museum, Valentina, like other taxidermists, also works a lot with hunting trophies.
"When an animal is shot in Africa, for example, the natives who specialize in that, take the meat for food and the skin is carefully removed and it is sent salted in containers to Europe. That one reaches me…”
On the wall of Valentina's workshop are a large number of diplomas from European and world taxidermy competitions. The European championships are most often held in Austria, and the world championships in the USA. This year's World Taxidermy & Fish Carving Championship will be held in August in Coralville, Iowa, USA.
Valentina says that there are more and more "repairs". Like cosmetic surgeons who repair the "works" of their less skilled or less conscientious colleagues, Valentina often "molds" badly done stuffed animals.
In addition to Florian and Valentina, there are several studios and companies in Serbia that deal with taxidermy of animals and birds. Dejan Marić from Užice has been doing this business since he was 15 years old. Dragan Milosavljević Malac from Drenovac near Paraćin has been stuffing animals for 45 years and so far about 15.000 preparations have passed through his hands. This man from Drenov prepares 300 to 500 animals a year, and he is especially skilled when it comes to fish. "I am currently working on the complete fish life of the rivers of Serbia for the Museum of Ichthyology, which is being established at one of the faculties in Kragujevac. I finished the part and the professors brought about fifteen types of fish, and I will also work on bream, bream, grayling... By the way, the fish is difficult to prepare, and the most difficult thing is to peel the skin so that the color does not come off", says Malac from Drenovac.
