Hussar shakos

The company ARKANZAS produced some badges to order, but in most cases only by intuition. They sensed how eager civilians and soldiers were to look for the badges, so they themselves came up with special assortments. When their calculation seemed to be right, entire series were produced with similar motifs. Shields made for the honvéd hussar regiments were already mentioned here. In this post, I am writing about the shako badges for the common hussar regiments.

There were 16 K.u.K. hussar regiments. Their uniforms differed in one point only: the color of their shako was different. Specifically, there were repetitive colors, but the color of the headgear was typical of the regiment. The colors used were white, gray, blue and red. In addition, as with other troops, the field cap and hussar shakos also featured the regiment number, of course. From this, the design idea was easily born. Numbered shakos should be made that are the color of the individual regiments showing also the adequate numbering. That’s how it happened. Sixteen types of badge were prepared.

Unfortunately, the badges did not depict the shako completely faithfully. For example, the cord tassel is not shown on the shako cord. This was replaced by the regiment number, which, in turn, was not visible on the sides of the original headgear, but on the coat of arms in the front side. There was another spectacular difference. The sweat band of the hussar shakos was a black leather rim on the bottom, not the same color used for the shako body. The other details are pretty much the same, and overall these little badges are very nice and spectacular.

One more comment needs to be made. For not sixteen kinds of badges were made, but in reality twenty kinds. The company made two types for four regiments. For the 1st, blue, 2nd white, 5th red, and 10th blue shakos, the visor is either black (correctly) or colored. So these four color variations were added to the original 16.

In this post, I present two versions of the 5th Hussar Regiment’s shako. The decorated postcard fits in very well with this. The card design did not try to depict the badge correctly, but the real headgear. In any case, it is also red.