The tarantass is a four-wheeled
horse-drawn vehicle
A horse-drawn vehicle is a piece of equipment pulled by one or more horses. These vehicles typically have two or four wheels and were used to carry passengers or a load. They were once common worldwide, but they have mostly been replaced by auto ...
on a long longitudinal frame, reducing road jolting on long-distance travel. It was widely used in Russia in the first half of the 19th century. It generally carried four passengers. The origin of the word is not known:
Max Vasmer
Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer (; ; 28 February 1886 – 30 November 1962) was a Russian and German linguist. He studied problems of etymology in Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and worked on the history of Slavic, Baltic, ...
's lists a number of variants from regional dialects to the ancient
Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...
roots with the mark "doubtful".
Description
Vladimir Sollogub and
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas (born Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas , was a French novelist and playwright.
His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the mos ...
gave ironic descriptions of a tarantass that may be summarized as follows. The tarantass has been described as two long poles serving as parallel
axles supporting a large basket forming a cup or bowl. It is not suspended on springs, and generally has no benches. The vehicle is accessed by an external ladder. The interior is generally covered by
straw
Straw is an agricultural byproduct consisting of the dry wikt:stalk, stalks of cereal plants after the grain and chaff have been removed. It makes up about half of the crop yield, yield by weight of cereal crops such as barley, oats, rice, ry ...
, changed at intervals for cleanliness, upon which the passengers rest.
The types of a tarantass manufactured in early
Soviet Union
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
varied.
In popular culture
In 1840, author
Vladimir Sollogub published a satirical novelette ''"Tarantass"''. The main hero of the story drove a team of three horses.
In 1893, medical doctor and Christian missionary Charles Wenyon travelled from Vladivostok to the Urals, to the marker on the boundary of Europe and Asia by a combination of tarantass and river steamer. He claimed to be one of the last Englishmen to take this route "in the old fashioned way", by steamboat (up the Ussuri and Amur), tarantas (across the expanses of Siberia), and rail (at the last stretch along the newly-constructed railroad branch from Europe, across the
Ural River into Siberia). His journey is described in ''Four Thousand Miles Across Siberia: On the Great Post-Road''.
[Anthony Cross]
In the Lands of the Romanovs
p. 47, 304 He described tarantas as "a sort of means of transport which combines the disadvantages of all the others".
See also
* Other horse-drawn vehicles of Russia:
**
Droshky — a four-wheeled open carriage where passengers straddle the seat
**
Telega — a wagon
**
Troika — sleigh driven by three horses abreast
**
Kibitka — enclosed sleigh driven like a troika
*
Horses in Russia
References
External links
* http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Tarantass
{{Horse-drawn carriages
Carriages