The Illustrious Royal Bear Hunting

This popular joke says that sometimes back in the Communist times an important guest comes to Hungary for hunting, and he expresses his wish to shot a bear. In vain he is told that in Hungary there are no bears, this unimportant circumstance does not interest him. Finally they find a solution. They buy the old bear of the circus, and they let him go on the forest path in the direction of the high-stand. The bear is walking meekly towards his fate. However, Old John is coming on a bicycle from the opposite direction. As soon as he catches sight of the bear, he gets awfully terrified: he jumps from the bike and runs into the forest. The eyes of the bear twinkle: a bicycle! Finally something familiar in this strange place. He grasps the bike, sits on it just as he had done in all his life, and cycles towards the high-stand…









Don’t laugh. This has really happened. True, as the Erevan Radio says, with a minor difference. And not in Hungary, but in Russia. And the exalted guest was none else but Juan Carlos I, King of Spain.


The story was exposed in the 19 October 2006 edition of Kommersant. They wrote that Sergei Starostin, the supervisor of hunting in Vologda region who had been fired by his superior Andrei Filatov, sent a letter to the Governor of Vologda in which he described in detail the circumstances of the bear hunting of King Juan Carlos in August. He stated that the bear killed by the king was in the reality a meek animal called Mitrofan from the zoo of the nearby resource village Novlenskoe. Filatov had it brought to the place of hunting in a cage, and had it made stiff drunk with vodka mixed in honey before the hunting.

Within a couple of days the news went around the world. The Guardian has also recalled the cases of the bears stunned before hunting for Khrushchev and Brezhnev, and 24/7 even remembered the similar stories of Ceauşescu. The otherwise strongly right-wing El Mundo has made an exclusive interview with Starostin, also publishing the photo of Mitrofan. And the humor blog Harpo has even expounded that a detailed prophecy of the case had been written hieroglyphically long before in the papal coat of arms of Benedict XVI. The visual commentaries are not missing either, first of all in the Spanish press, of course. The most famous one is the title page of the weekly humor supplement of El Jueves which was sued ex officio by the state prosecutor for high treason, as according to its inscription the bear was made drunk so he would be “on equal conditions” with the king. However, the court has acquitted them by saying that the cartoon was “cruel” but “absolutely acceptable in a democratic society”. And the king, who has been collecting the cartoons of El Jueves made on him, explicitly liked it.




But as this story has happened in Russia, it almost begs for being immortalized in the form of a lubok as it used to be done with illustrious events, historical personalities and royal huntings in past centuries.


Thus a detailed report was published in the February 2008 edition of the journal GQ by Kseniya Sokolova, which was illustrated with eight gorgeous luboks by Vladimir Kamaev in the manner of Andrei Kuznetsov.










However, we are even better informed than the shrewd reporter of GQ. We also have first-hand knowledge on what the king ate during the hunt. But this information deserves a separate post.

Update of April 15, 2012: In connection with this post we must recall the new hunting feat of Don Juan Carlos, reported yesterday in the Spanish press. This time he attempted to shoot down an elephant in the Botswana jungle, but the adventure costed him a painful hip fracture. We hope he will recover quickly, but above all we hope that the inventive African art will be able to tell the story with so much delicacy as the above Russian luboks did.