Mosques and Cemeteries of the Polish Muslim Tatars - history, shape, characteristics

What is it about?

Islam is one of Poland’s traditional religions. The first Muslims to appear within the borders of the historical Polish state were the Tatars from the Golden Horde, a state that became nominally Islamic in the thirteenth century. The so-called Polish-Lithuanian Tatars arrived in the fourteenth century and settled in the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The territory of today’s Poland was first inhabited by the Tatars in the seventeenth century when they were granted land in Podlachia. In the new homeland, they not only enjoyed religious freedom but were allowed to practice Islam freely, erect mosques, and organise religious communities around them; in the seventeenth century, there were already around thirty mosques on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian state. The mosques were wooden, so they could be easily destroyed, and the new ones were built on the same site. Initially, cemeteries were built around the mosques, but due to lack of space, sometimes they were moved outside the settlement. Two Tatar wooden mosques in Poland (from the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries) have survived to this day. There are still Tatar Muslim cemeteries in places where there are or were mosques. The gravestones there are made of stone, with preserved inscriptions in Arabic, Polish, and sometimes Turkish. The article presents traces of Muslim heritage in the Polish landscape against the background of the history of Tatar mosques and cemeteries that form it. It also points out the traces of the coexistence of Muslims and Christians in these lands, which have manifested themselves in the form of wooden mosques and Muslim tombstones in Tatar graveyards.

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Photo by LuX Clara on Unsplash

Photo by LuX Clara on Unsplash