History
So, now we at last come to history.
(I did not put in up first, as some might think it is boring...)
The breed was first properly described, with photographs and size measurments and
everything, by that Austrian travel writer of his time, Fr. B. Laska. Well, he was
not exactly a travel writer, but a hunter who spent much time in the then freshly
liberated Bosnia. (Although some say it was not exactly liberated. The war of 1878
ended in Austrian occupation of Bosnia, which was later (in 1908) annexed, not to
everybody's liking. Some seeds of World War I lay there.) Laska described the rich
fauna and beauties of Bosnia in his book (Das Waidwerk in Bosnia und der
Hercegovina, Klagenfurt 1905) which included a chapter on Bosnian hounds. At the
time, three varieties existed: shorthair, longhair and “barak”. The descendants of
shorthairs are today's “yugoslav tricolor hounds”, also a very rare breed
(Tricolor hounds exist elsewhere too, notably in northern Europe; some today's
cynologist put up the theory that the “amber trade trail” helped to connect breeds
from Scandinavia to those in the Balkans), while the longhair, which looked
similar to the two other breeds in everything but that had coat much like today's
spaniels, became extinct. The word “barak” means, in Turkish, “rough-haired” and
although the Turkish language has lots of words off Arabian roots, this one is
the word of proper Turkish, not Arabian origin. Sometimes horses are described as
“barak” (if they are woolly coated) and it is also a common name, as for instance,
Barak was the name of the brother of the Turkish noble that founded Sarajevo. And,
but I do not know for sure, are not all those Baraks in Israel today are of
sephardic descent? (There is, of course, also Barak the warrior mentioned in the
Bible.) Arabic language has a similar word, baraka, meaning - apsolutely
unrelated to dogs - a kind of blessing. There was the mentioning of the
breed even before, as for instance a
Russian, [...] Sabanyeev, mentions them, and quotes also that one A. Tchaikovsky
wrote about them in magazines. Laska himself speculates, quoting an [16ct]
dictionary, that the very word “bracke” (“scenthound” in German) comes from the
mistake that the name “barak” stands for all hounds; subsequently the French
“braque” and Italian “bracco” (all meaning “bird-dog”) come from the same origin,
not quite contradictory if one has in mind the versatility of eastern scenthounds.
To go even further back in time, the Byzantine author Arrian wrote about Celtic
hounds of his time, who were rough-coated and had voices “like damned souls” - the
first description in literature of dogs “giving tongue” on the trail, not only
after they see game, as described by previous Greek cynologists, but while
following the scent. (Those Celts were the easternmost Celtic tribes, who roamed
Balkans and made war at one time with Greece getting as far south as Delphy.) This
reference was the reason that at one time the breed was registered as “Celtic
hound” (and one Slovenian author once had them as “Illiryan hounds”, Illiryans
being another group of tribes in the Balkans), but the name reverted to the nice
name Barak, as it was obviously preposterous to presume that this was one and the
same line all those centuries; although some genetic relation is quite certain,
the region has in the past seen too much cut&paste of human populations (just as
today) to suppose that today's dogs are the direct unmixed descendants from those
hounds of ancient Celts.
One fact is evident from all the literature of any time: this breed indeed does
stem from ancient history, and was well established when at last it got to the
show ring. However, it was not quite distinct at the time from Istrian wirehair
hound, as both of those breeds had then wider range of colours than today; but it
is easy to suppose that the breeds at adjacent sides of main east-west border in
Europe, through which lot of trade went once the great 14 and 15ct wars ended,
(making Venice and Dubrovnik stinking rich in the process!), had some genetic
material seep throught too, as in the ancient times dogs were valued sometimes
quite high; they were on various occasions given as presents to kings and nobles,
exchanged for land (one medieval document in Bosnian city Vitez mentions a meadow
as payment for a bitch), or for livestock - usually, the price was: a pregnant
sheep of one's own pick, for a puppy - a good price even today.
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