Hunting World Exhibition

Hunting World Exhibition 1971 –

Budapest, Hungary

This exhibition was the first and one of the greatest hunting world exhibition of all times.

It was hold in 1971 in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. There were some previous international exhibitions - 1910, Vienna, Austria; 1937 Berlin, Germany; 1954 Düsseldorf, Germany; 1960, Firenze, Italy; 1967 Novi Sad, ex- Yugoslavia (today is Serbia) - but those were not world-wide known and reported exhibitions. The Budapest exhibition was held between August 27 and September 30, 1971 at the Budapest exhibition area where many agricultural exhibitions used to held before on a more than 33 hectares (~82 US acres) land. The numbers of the represented nations show us the Budapest exhibition’s greatness. From four different continents (Europe, Africa, America and Asia) altogether 52 countries participated and 35 countries held their national exhibitions and shows. The „Hunting in the world” representitave exhibition was put together by 34 different nations. Related to this show was hold a special trophy exhibition as well showing and exhibiting 118 trophies of 18 wild games of 19 countries. The individual countries’ indoor pavilions and booths could be found on more than 30.000 square meters. The outdoor, openair exhibition part was bigger than 60.000 square meters representing living wildlife and horse shows and exhibitions. The Budapest exhibition during the 35 days attracted more than 2 million visitors. From this more than 200.000 visitors came from abroad as foreign visitors. Besides many hunting and wildlife experts some famous politicans – L.I. Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party; HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; André Cools, Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium, etc. - also visited the exhibition. With its grandiose arrangement the Budapest Hunting World Exhibition brought great international reputation to the Hungarian wildlife management and hunting what even nowadays still effects. The two effective, but ’70- style slogans of the exhibitions were „Nature conservation is a conservation of ourselves” and „Peace, friendship, nature, health, recreation, sport”.

During the exhibition the international trophy measuring and scoring comittee appraised altogether 521 Hungarian red stag trophies, 63 fallow buck palms, 336 roe buck antlers, 25 mouflon ram horns and 174 wild boar tusks. The Gyulaj Co. previous predecessor in title the Gyulaj State Forestry and Gamefarm’s fallow buck trophies ruled the exhibition’s fallow deer section. Both the ’69 Fehér- fallow buck and the 1970 Tolnai- fallow buck was officially scored during the exhibition. Interesting fact that the two wonderful bucks took over the world ranklist’s first place from each others. From the 155 fallow buck trophies of 13 nations only 15 was scored more than 200.00 IP points and from this 15 trophies 14 came from Gyulaj Co’s hunting grounds. Besides its extraordinary attractions and pageantry during the exhibition many international treaties, agreements and conventions were born. Those treaties and conventions still act important part of nowadays’ international wildlife management and conservation.

PLEASE SEE SOME ARCHIVE AND EXCLUSIVE TROPHY PHOTO AND STAMP COLLECTIONS OF THE '71 EXHIBITION: