The Illustrious Royal Bear Hunting

Manasse Codex, ca. 1300 Prince Harwart kills a bear, the future heraldic animal of his dynasty

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…

something like this… (from here)

or like this (from here)

or like this (from here)

or like this (from here)

or like this (from here)

or like this (from here)

or eventually like this (from here)

or something like this way (from here)

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.

Title page and a cartoon of El Jueves’ humor supplement. The inscription of the vodka barrell is: “To feel yourself like a king!”

“Come on, bear, take a draught.” – The king as a honorary president of WWF has proposed a minor change in the emblem of the organization.

Forester: “Take this and then have a walk.” Bear: “Thank you, but I do not drink since my cousin drank and was shot in the forest.”

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.

“The hunter wounds the bear and the dogs lacerate it”. Lubok, 18th century

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.

“Ivan Karlos, King of Spain shoots at the extremely drunken bear Mitrofan.” The bear, however
strange it is, does not surrender itself, but is shouting “Hello!” On its typical gesture
and the greeting Превед! which does not figure in any dictionary
but has become a frequent linguistic meme of the
Russian net, we will write in a next post.

Putin (with the inscription “Czar”) “says goodbye to King Ivan Karlos leaving Sochi for
hunting”. According to the article, in the Vologda Government the king was
waited for with a double rainbow painted on the sky.

“So Mitrofan would not kill the king, Egor [Jäger, that is, the ranger] made him drunk with mead [according to the text of GQ, with vodka in honey].”

“While Karlos does away with Mitrofan, Princess Leticia loses her way in the forest.”

On hearing the news, writes the article, the perfidious Spanish press recalls everything:
that Juan Carlos had shot eight bears in Roumania, and that he was even
a fellow hunter to General Franco. The animal in the picture
is marked as a “Beast”.

“King Ivan Karlos in his court.”

The news trigger an inspection in Russia. Did the king really kill a drunken bear?
Version “A”: No. The “boyars” swear before the Governor (whose head
is covered from mortal eyes by the shining disk of the sun) that
“Mitrofanushka” was not killed by Karlos but by them.

Version “B”: No. World-weary Mitrofan himself blow his brains out. Fortunately
he has also left a letter: “Please do not accuse anyone for my death.
Your Mitrofan.” According to GQ, this is in fact the most
probable and most satisfying version. And the letter
of Mitrofan is written on nothing else
but a birch bark – a lubok.

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.