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The Tatars' deeper history
The Alimov family of ishans
The Alimovs are a Mišär family of imams and ishans from the village of Kuy Suvõ (Russian: Ovechy Ovrag) in the Sergach country of the Nizhny Novgorod province — the same Mišär hear…
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The Cuman Lord's Prayer
The Cuman Lord's Prayer (the Kipchak-language Pater Noster) is the most famous surviving text in the Cuman — that is, Kipchak — language. It is known in two forms: as a written pra…
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The Cumans of Hungary (kunok)
The Cumans of Hungary (Hungarian kunok, singular kun) are the westernmost branch of the Kipchak-Cuman tribes — descendants of the same steppe people whose language the Codex Cumani…
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The Kipchak Steppe (Dasht-i Qipchaq)
The Kipchak Steppe (Dasht-i Qipchaq) was a vast grassland from the Danube to the Irtysh, held in the 11th–13th centuries by the Cuman-Kipchak confederation. It was not a centralise…
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Volga Bulgaria
Volga Bulgaria was a Turkic trading state at the confluence of the Volga and the Kama, lasting from about the 7th–8th century until 1236. It is the direct forerunner of the Kazan T…
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The Khazar Khaganate
The Khazar Khaganate was a great power of Turkic origin that in the 7th–10th centuries ruled the steppes of the lower Volga and the North Caucasus. Its capital was Atil at the mout…
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Why Mišär is the closest living language to Cuman
In the judgement of the classics of Turkology, the living language closest to the Cuman (Kipchak) of the Codex Cumanicus is Mišär — the language of the Estonian Tatars' ancestors.…
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Tatar life in Tallinn
Tallinn was the oldest and most enduring centre of the Estonian Tatars. Where the Narva community was destroyed in the Second World War, Tallinn's lives on to this day. The city's…
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Tatar life in Narva
Narva was, alongside Tallinn, the second heart of the Estonian Tatars: by the community's own estimate about half of the historical Estonian Tatars lived here. It was in Narva that…
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The history of Narva
Narva is Estonia's easternmost city, on the Narva River at the Russian border. For centuries it was a prosperous trading town and a jewel of Swedish-era Baroque — and also a second…
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The Nizhny Novgorod migration
The Nizhny Novgorod migration is the emigration wave that in the second half of the 19th century carried Mišär Tatars from the villages of the Sergach country to the Baltic coast.…
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Tatar soldiers in Estonia
Tatar soldiers are the starting point of the Estonian Tatars' story: the first Tatars reached the Estonian lands precisely as soldiers — in the 16th century in the armies of the Li…
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The Serving Tatars
The Serving Tatars (Tatar: yomyshly tatarlar) were a class of ethnic Tatar state servants who served Muscovy (and Poland-Lithuania) in the 14th–18th centuries as soldiers, border g…
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The Qasim Khanate
The Qasim Khanate (1452–1681) was a Tatar khanate on the middle Oka in the Meshchera region, with its capital at Kasimov. As a vassal of Moscow it lasted over two centuries — and i…
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Edigü (Yedigei)
Edigü (c. 1352–1419; Idegäj in the Tatar epic, also known via Russian as Yedigei/Jedigei) was a commander of the Manghit tribe who ruled the Golden Horde as its de facto sovereign…
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The Golden Horde
The Golden Horde (also the Ulus of Jochi or the Kipchak Khanate) was a great power of the 13th–15th centuries, ruling the steppes from the Danube to Siberia, centred on the lower V…
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Timur Seifullen
Timur Seifullen is one of the leaders of the Estonian Tatar community in restored Estonia. He was the first chairman of the Tatar Cultural Society founded in 1988, has chaired the…
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Sibgadulla Mähdejev
Sibgadulla Mähdejev (b. 1863 in Nizhny Novgorod province – d. 1939 in Tallinn) was, before the First World War, the most honoured and richest Estonian Tatar, whom the Estonian pres…
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History of Estonia's Muslim Tatars (Abiline and Ringvee)
This article digests what the historian Toomas Abiline and the scholar of religion Ringo Ringvee write about the history of Estonia's Muslim Tatars in the academic volume Muslim Ta…
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A genetic profile and the Mišär heritage
A deep analysis of one Estonian Biobank (geenidoonor.ee) profile. The profile owner's mother is a Mišär Tatar and father an Estonian. The analysis splits the profile into two paren…
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