RUSSIAN BLUE
For the first forty-one years that cat shows were held in Great Britain, all shorthaired blue cats, regardlessof origin, competed in the same class. Some of those cats were blue domestic shorthairs from Great Britain, others were foreign-born cats that were variously called Archangel, said cat lover Harrison Weir, were of a deeper, purer tint than the English cross-breed.” The Archangel cats “had larger ears and eyes, and were larger and longer in the head.” they had been named after the city of Arkhangelsk, a port on the White Sea about 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle, from where they may have been carried by sailors to Western Europe in the 1860s.
