They were admired already by Alexander the Great, who had a horse of that breed called Bucephalus. Marco Polo, the famous Medieval traveller, also wrote about them. Beautiful, noble, tenacious, capable of surviving many days in the desert without water, they are the pride of the Turkmen and one of the symbols of their country. Akhal Teke horses, because it is them that I am talking about, boast a long history.
 
Approximately 10,000 years ago, as desertification took hold of Central Asia, the stocky horses indigenous to its steppe grasslands began to evolve into the lean and graceful but hardy horses that inhabit Turkmenistan today. As food and water became more scarce the heavy frame of the horse gave way to a lighter one. Longer necks, a higher head carriage, larger eyes and longer ears evolved to better the horse’s ability to see, smell, and hear predators over the increasingly open plains. The golden coloring predominant among the akhalteke provided the necessary camouflage against the desert landscape.

The Akhal Teke breed of horses have survived hundreds of years, mainly thanks to the efforts of their owners, i.e. the warlike Turkmen tribe called Teke, who used the horses during wars waged with their neighbours. The Tekes avoided cross-breeding them with other horses in order to keep the marvellous features of the breed.

The Russian conquest of the second half of the 19th century marked the beginning of difficult times for the Akhal Teke horses .

The Russian Army knew the Tekes were difficult to get because of their horses […]. So they said, ‘If we kill the horses, the Teke won’t survive.’ And they slaughtered a lot of horses, and after that the breed almost disappeared.
The horses suffered during the collectivization of agriculture under the Soviets. Some Turkmen owners let them run loose in the desert rather than allow them to become part of big collective farms.

Later, the breed was considered prestigious enough for Marshall Georgii Zhukov to ride in a Moscow victory parade after World War II.

However, during Nikita Khrushchev’s rule, many horses were slaughtered again, as the government of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic considered the realization of the plan of meat production prepared in Moscow more important.

Better times for Akhal Teke horses came only after the collapse of the USSR with the emergence of independent Turkmenistan. Saparmurat Niyazov, who was undoubtedly a tyrant, was a Teke tribe member and as such had an affection for horses for which he allocated huge sums of the state budget. He also liked to present the horses as a gift to the most respectable foreign leaders.

In case you were interested in the subject, I recommend you the web portal www.ahalteke.net, where you will find a lot of information about the horses and some beautiful photos. You can also watch short videos about the horses on YouTube. Here’s one of them:

I could also recomend you an interesting article by Jonathan Maslow entitled “The Golden Horses of Turkmenistan”.