Article on Poland in the book "Muslim Tatar Minorities in the Baltic Sea Region" 2018

What is it about?

Polish Tatars constitute a small but quite close-knit religious and ethnic minority. The present structure of the Polish Tatar minority was formed after the First World War, when Poland regained independence after 123 years of partitions. In spite of 45 years of communist rule after the Second World War, Polish Tatars managed to preserve their religion and traditions; and after 1989, when Poland became a democratic state again, they started to revive old ways and develop new ones of transmitting their religious and cultural heritage.

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Photo by Leonid Privalov on Unsplash

Photo by Leonid Privalov on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Polish Tatars constitute a small but quite close-knit religious and ethnic minority. The present structure of the Polish Tatar minority was formed after the First World War, when Poland regained independence after 123 years of partitions. In spite of 45 years of communist rule after the Second World War, Polish Tatars managed to preserve their religion and traditions; and after 1989, when Poland became a demo- cratic state again, they started to revive old ways and develop new ones of transmit- ting their religious and cultural heritage. Polish Tatars are descendants of the Tatars who started to settle in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth century (Kryczyński 2000: 4–5). The first Tatars settled in the territories of today’s Poland in the seventeenth century (Sobczak 1984: 34–38), mainly in the Podlachia (Pol. Podlasie) region in the east, where in 1679 they were granted land by King John iii Sobieski along with the same duties and privileges as Tatars in Lithuania (Konopacki 2010: 78). Because of their military service and fief ownership, most Polish Tatars in practice belonged to the noble class (Kryczyński 2000: 27). In the second half of the seventeenth century, their status already equalled that of the Christian Polish- Lithuanian nobility (Borawski 1986: 178–180).