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Eesti tatarlased is a community platform for language preservation and heritage. Our aim is to preserve and revive the Mišär Tatar language as spoken by the historical Estonian Tat…
Read →Soviet occupation
Desecrated sacred sites in Estonia
Estonia's sacred sites — churches, synagogues, prayer houses, mosques, monasteries and natural holy places — were desecrated by the two occupations of the 20th century. The Soviet…
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The economic impact of the Soviet occupation on Estonia
The Soviet occupation (1940–1991) took an open, agriculture-and-export economy that in the late 1930s stood roughly level with Finland's, and over half a century reduced it to a fr…
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The Treaty of Tartu
The Treaty of Tartu (Tartu rahu, 2 February 1920) was the peace treaty between the Republic of Estonia and Soviet Russia (Nõukogude Venemaa) that ended the Estonian War of Independ…
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Sürgün — the deportation of the Crimean Tatars
The Sürgün (Crimean Tatar Sürgünlik, “the Exile”) is the Crimean Tatars' name for the 1944 deportation, when the Soviet occupation authorities removed an entire people from Crimea…
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Soviet policy toward minority cultures
The Soviet Union's policy toward minority cultures moved from the indigenisation of the 1920s to Stalinist russification. For a Turkic-Muslim people like the Tatars and for occupie…
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Why the Soviet Union destroyed cemeteries
The Soviet occupation razed, closed and built over hundreds of cemeteries in Estonia and across the whole Soviet Union — in Estonia and Union-wide. Why? No document says “we are de…
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The Siselinna military cemetery
The military section of Tallinn's Siselinna (Inner City) cemetery is a burial ground for soldiers. During the occupation it was desecrated and the traces of foreign military rememb…
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The Narva German military cemetery
The Narva German military cemetery held the graves of German soldiers of the Second World War. As in Rakvere, it was destroyed during the occupation and restored only after the res…
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The Rakvere German military cemetery
The Rakvere German military cemetery held the graves of German soldiers of the Second World War. During the occupation it was destroyed, and it was restored only in the 1990s.
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The Rakvere old town cemetery
The Rakvere old town cemetery was the town's main burial ground for over a century and a half. During the occupation it was liquidated and turned into a park.
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The Tartu old Jewish cemetery
The Tartu old Jewish cemetery was the town's first Jewish burial ground, in the Raadi-Kruusamäe district. Today a single gravestone remains.
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The Tartu Muslim cemetery
The Tartu Muslim cemetery was a small Islamic burial ground in the Raadi-Kruusamäe district — one of the few Muslim burial places in Estonia outside Tallinn, Narva and Rakvere. Onl…
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The destruction of sacred sites and cemeteries in the Soviet Union
The destruction of the Estonian Tatars' Muslim cemetery was not a local exception but part of a policy that spanned the whole Soviet Union. Nothing was sacred to the Soviet occupat…
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Reburials under the Soviet occupation
When the occupation authorities closed and razed Estonia's cemeteries, the dead often had to be reburied elsewhere. This page gathers what is known about the reburials — chiefly th…
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Orthodoxy under the Soviet occupation
The religious policy of the Soviet occupation was state atheism — the aim was to eradicate religion. Yet the treatment was not equal: the Moscow-Patriarchate Russian Orthodox Churc…
Read →Estonian Tatar history
The Rakvere Tatar cemetery
The Rakvere Tatar community had its own Islamic cemetery — as did those in Tallinn and Narva. According to the Estonian Heritage Yearbook, with the Tatar merchant activity that rev…
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The Old Turkic script
The Old Turkic script (also the Orkhon-Yenisei script, or the Turkic runes) is the oldest writing system of the Turkic language — the alphabet in which the Turkic inscriptions of t…
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