The Lipka Tatars
The Lipka Tatars
The Lipka Tatars are a Turkic minority in Belarus, Lithuania and Poland. They descend from the Kipchaks of the Golden Horde and the Crimean and Kazan Khanates, and settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the 14th century. learntatar.com lists them among the Tatar subgroups.
The wooden mosque of Kruszyniany in north-eastern Poland, the oldest Lipka Tatar mosque in the country (Polimerek; CC BY-SA 3.0; Wikimedia Commons)
Relation to the Mišär Tatars: the Lipka Tatars are NOT Mišärs but a separate western group of Kipchak descent. They share with the Mišär only the distant common Golden Horde and Kipchak background that all Tatars have — a general rather than a specific link (an educated guess). Unlike the Estonian Tatars, who migrated from the Volga region of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, the ancestors of the Lipka Tatars came from the steppe to Lithuania already in the Middle Ages.
History and settlement
The first Tatar settlers reached Lithuanian lands in the early 14th century. In 1397 the Islamic Tatars were invited to settle by Grand Duke Vytautas the Great after Khan Tokhtamysh's defeat by Tamerlane (per the chronicler Jan Długosz). Early settlements clustered around Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna and Kaunas.
Religion and language
Religion: Sunni Islam; in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth the Lipkas had about 400 mosques and remained very attached to their faith.
Language: though an ethnically Kipchak-Turkic people, the Lipka Tatars lost their Tatar language and adopted Belarusian, Lithuanian and Polish.
Written heritage: they wrote Belarusian in the Arabic script — the so-called kitab manuscripts — until the 1930s.
A community of soldiers
From the Battle of Grunwald (1410, about a thousand horse archers) onward, Lipka Tatar light-cavalry regiments took part in the campaigns of Lithuania and Poland. The Lipka Rebellion occurred in 1672; King Jan III Sobieski granted them noble titles for their service.
Population
About 10,000–15,000 today (over 26,000 in 1993).
Belarus: 8,445 (2019 census).
Lithuania: 2,142 (2021).
Poland: 1,916 (2011).
See also
Sources: Wikipedia „Lipka Tatars” (en.wikipedia.org); learntatar.com (by Aygul Ahmetcan), „Tatar Subgroups”.