Persian Cat Breed Origin
There’s a beautiful legend which tells that the Persian cat was created by a wizard from a sparkle, which jumped out of the fire, the shimmer of two far away stars and a curl of grey smoke. I’d say that this legend rather closely describes appearance and temperament of the Persian cat, but the real history of persian cat breed is not less interesting or less mysterious.
So how does such mutation as long hair appear in a domestic cat? None of its wild counterparts has long hair gene. Well, if only lynx and snow leopard have a slightly longer coat due to the environmental conditions of their habitat.
It’s rather difficult now to investigate the origins of the long-haired cats, but most probably they are rooted in Persia, which is now called Iran. That’s from where Pietro della Valle brought several long-haired cat beauties to Italy in 1620. And a few years later the scholar and naturalist Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc brought long-haired cats form Angora (now Ankara in Turkey) to France. When the first long-haired cats appeared in England (which is now called ‘the second motherland of the Persian cats) they were called ‘French cats’.
It’s not exactly known whether those were the cats of one and the same breed. Nowadays it is the recognized fact that there existed several breeds of long-haired cats in the East. Angora cats were described as fluffy, light and active animals of a medium size, while well-known Alfred Edmund Brehm described long-haired Angora cats as big-sized and clumsy cats. He as well noted that grey and blue Angora cats were observed in the South of Siberia.
It’s not easy to answer the question why the animal from hot Asian counties has got long hair, while Mother Nature usually gifted long-hair to animals from severe Northern countries.
There are several versions regarding the long-haired cats origin. Some believe that among the ancestors of the Persian cat breed there were long-haired cats form Siberia which at first got into East and Small Asia, and only then were brought to Western Europe.
Others believe that long hair was a mutation which happened to a short-haired cat in the East, which then was kept in the process of domestication and some sort of selection – thus the cats which got into Europe and Siberia were aborigineous to Eastern countries.
The third theory roots in the phenotypic differences between the Persian cats and other domestic cats. This theory suggests that massive stocky with the ears set wide, big round head are related to Pallas’ Cat ( Felis manul ) otherwise known as Manul – wild cat which lives in Central Asia and has comparatively long hair, flat face with round eyes and ears set low on the head. Recent research however refutes this theory.
Such are the different Persian cat origin theories but anyway, all of them are pointing to Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan as the Persian cat native lands.
England is rightfully called the second Motherland of the Persian cats, as it were British cat fanciers who started to purposefully breed cat breeds (and primarily – Persian cat breed) in the 19th century. Although that was the time when the long-haired cats started being differentiated into Turkish Angora (long flexible body, silky but less thick coat, big pointed ears) and Persian cats (massive, with big round head and small ears), as a matter of fact only blue cats of the latter were called Persian, and all the rest were simply called ‘long-haired’ cats. Every of about 50 colors of long-haired cats was considered to be a separate breed. Till nowadays the Persian cat in England is not in fact called ‘Persian’ but rather ‘long-haired’, and every color vari