The event featured a film screening and lectures entitled "Traditional Religious Culture of Polish-Lithuanian Tatars: Its Unique Sources and Contemporary Fate."
The film and lectures are a result of fieldwork in traditional Tatar settlements in Poland and Lithuania, capturing the last bearers of medieval ceremonial and linguistic forms, rooted back to the Golden Horde era.
Andrzej Drozd, a senior lecturer from the Department of European Islam at the University of Warsaw's Oriental Studies Faculty, led the session and was joined by guest speakers who delved into the cultural phenomena of this unique community, embedded in the landscape of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
This insightful event explored the fading world of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, and offered a rare glimpse into their enduring legacy and current challenges.
The Tatars of Polish-Lithuanian heritage are an indigenous population group that has resided since the 14th/15th century in the eastern lands of the former Commonwealth.
They have integrated and assimilated into the surrounding population, including adopting state identities, while maintaining a high degree of religious life permanence and adherence to tradition.
The initial Tatar immigrants endeavored to maintain their shamanistic beliefs and found refuge with the non-Christian Lithuanians. By the late 14th century, a subsequent influx of Muslim Tatars was welcomed into the Grand Duchy by Vytautas the Great.
Initially settling in key areas of Lithuania such as Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna and Kaunas, these Tatars eventually expanded into other regions that would later form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an area now spanning parts of modern Lithuania, Belarus and Poland.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP, dzieje.pl