Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 27 – The
Lithuanian parliament has voted unanimously to declare 2021, the 700th
anniversary of the appearance of Tatars in what is now the Republic of
Lithuania, the Year of the History and Culture of the Lithuanian Tatars, a
group that today numbers only 3,000 but one that played an enormous role in the
history of Lithuania.
The parliament declared that “the
Tatas have left a significant mark in the history of Lithuania, they took part
in all wars and uprisings, and struggled for the freedom and independence of
Lithuania. [And] the Lithuanian Tatar community made a significant contribution
to the restoration of Lithuanian statehood” (business-gazeta.ru/article/444093).
Adas Jakubauskas, a historian who
heads the Lithuanian Tatar Community, says that he and his group consider
themselves to be “the descendants of those Tatars who settled in the Grand
Principality of Lithuania in 1397,” but
Polish historians date the history of the Tatars in the region to 1321 – and
that is the anniversary being celebrated.
“Unfortunately,” the historian continues,
this earlier “wave of Tatars completely assimilated: we know absolutely nothing
about it … but those Tatars, the descendants of whom we are came in 1397 and
recently we celebrated the 620th anniversary of the settlement of
Tatars on the land of the Grand Principality.”
According to Jakubauskas, “our ancestor came
to these lands as warriors; they were invited by the great prince.” And the
immediately took part in its wars and struggles, something they have done ever
since. At present, there are approximately
3,000 Lithuanian Tatars in the country. In addition, there are significant communities
in Belarus, Poland, the US and elsewhere.
Earlier this year, Rokas Zubovas, a
Lithuanian musician, visited Kazan. He is the grandson of the composer and
painter Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis; and he shared something important
about the Lithuanian Tatars. In the 19th century when the tsarist
authorities prohibited the publication of Lithuanian language books, activists
in Kazan went ahead and published them.
At that time, Zubovas related, Kazan
University had courses on the Lithuanian language and published books in
Lithuanian, including collections of songs and folkloric materials, which might
otherwise have been lost. These books went back to Lithuania via “secret ways
and were passed from hand to hand.”
For background on the Lithuanian
Tatars and other Tatar groups in the surrounding countries, see Ingvar Svanberg
and David Westerlund, eds., Muslim Tatar Minorities
in the Baltic Sea Region (Leiden, 2016, 182 pp.).
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