BELGRADE, Aug 28 (Reuters) - A 15-year row over the fate of a stray herd of white Lipizzaner horses will soon be over, and the surviving horses will be returned home to Croatia from Serbia, officials said on Tuesday.

The horses, originally a herd of some 90 animals, became refugees in 1991, when rebel Croatian Serbs shelled their stables in the town of Lipik in eastern Croatia in the early stages of the 1991-95 war, killing and injuring dozens.

Their fate was unknown until pictures of the eight remaining horses -- skinny, with sores and scratches and scrounging for food in a farm in northern Serbia -- surfaced on Serbian television in early August, sparking a media frenzy in Croatia and a movement for their return.

How the horses ended up in Serbia is contested, with some reports saying they wandered first into Bosnia and then to Serbia. Croatian media have run regular features on the horse mystery over the years, maintaining they were stolen.

The Serbian and Croatian agriculture ministers visited the horses in the farm near the town of Novi Sad on Tuesday and said the process for their repatriation had begun.

"Teams from both ministries will visit the horses, determine their number, offspring and health and prepare to do what we all want, notably return the horses to Croatia", said Petar Cobankovic, the Croatian minister.

His Serb counterpart Slobodan Milosavljevic said the procedure would be completed in the next two weeks.

The Lipizzaners, named after a stud farm founded in 1580 in Lipica -- then part of Austria's Habsburg Empire and now in Slovenia -- gained fame as the stars of Vienna's Spanish Riding School.

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