ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

August Wilhelm Freiherr von Taubenheim, from 6 April 1859 Count von Taubenheim (* 16). April 1805 in Stuttgart; † January 4, 1894, was master of stables and chambermaster of the kings Wilhelm I and Charles of Württemberg. From 1841 to 1846 he was also director of the Royal Court Theatre in Stuttgart.

Live life
Taubenheim was the offspring of the Saxon noble family Taubenheim, grandson of the Württemberg Minister of State Rudolf August Leberecht Freiherr von Taubenheim and son of the Württemberg Stallmeister and chambermaster August Freiherr von Taubenheim and his wife Caroline, born Bawr (1786-1856, also “Freiin von Baver”), an educated woman from the Electorate of Hesse. The father, who died on January 14, 1806 after a short illness, was a friend of the Crown Prince and later King Wilhelm I. This took care of the education of Taubenheim.

Until the age of 16 he attended the Royal Gymnasium Stuttgart, then the War School Ludwigsburg. The interest in horses shown there as a sub-lieutenant of the Royal Guard shaped his further career. In 1824 he began studying at the University of Göttingen. There he also attended the school for equestrian art and equipment founded by Johann Heinrich Ayrer. He then went to a riding school in Vienna for a long time.

In 1826 he returned to Stuttgart and was appointed chambermaster and stable master. As such, he acted as a companion, adviser and close confidant of King Wilhelm I. He shared with him the strong interest in horse breeding. With Julius von Hügel (1810–1884), the son of the württemberg war minister Ernst von Hügel, Taubenheim founded the “Wettrenn-Verein” in 1834, which organized a horse race every year at the main agricultural festival in Cannstatt and used the contributions of its members, among other things, to buy a prize horse to be raffled.

In 1840/1841 Taubenheim, accompanied by the writer Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer, the painter Friedrich Frisch and the doctor Karl Bopp (1817-1847), undertook a trip to the Orient, also to procure Arab horses for the Royal Württemberg Stud Farms Weil and Marbach. The journey, which fell at the time of the Oriental crisis and documented the hacklands in the later repeatedly published work Reise in den Orient as well as Frisch in the lithographic tablet sequence Arabia and oil paintings, led first with the ship down the Danube via Vienna to Giurgiu, then with the horse to Constantinople, where Sultan Abdülmecid I. received the Württemberg delegation in an audience. With the ship it went on over Rhodes, Cyprus and Beirut, where they survived in 1841 in stormy winter weather in the port of Therapia a shipwreck of the 1839 built in Trieste sea steamer Seri-Pervas of the Danube steamship company. From Beirut they moved again overland to Damascus and Jerusalem. In Jaffa there was an encounter with the Ottoman Ge