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Tatar culture
Famous Tatars
"Famous Tatars" gathers notable Tatar cultural figures — writers, artists and composers. The Tatar language-learning site learntatar.com (by Aygul Ahmetcan) maintains a "Famous Peo…
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Tatar mythology
Tatar mythology is a layered system of belief that overlays a pre-Islamic Tengrist and shamanist cosmology with later Islam. At its centre stand the supreme sky-god Tengri (Tatar T…
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Tatar traditions and customs
Note. The customs and holidays described here (Sabantuy, Narduğan, Cıyın, etc.) are Volga Tatar traditions. They differ from the customs of the historical Estonian Tatars, which ar…
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Tatar cultural heritage
Tatar cultural heritage covers the material and spiritual tradition of the Volga Tatars: sacred architecture and mosques, the construction and furnishing of the traditional village…
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History of the Tatars
The history of the Tatars covers the long development of the Volga Tatars and their ancestors along the middle Volga and in the Volga-Kama region: from the early Turkic peoples and…
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The Tatar language
Tatar is a Turkic language belonging to the Volga group of the Kipchak branch (the Kipchak-Bulgar subgroup). It has an estimated four to six million native speakers — Wikipedia giv…
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The Mišär Tatar dialect
The Mišär dialect (also the western dialect) is one of the main dialects of the Tatar language, spoken mostly outside Tatarstan. The learning site learntatar.com stresses that Mišä…
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Cuman and Mišär word comparison
This page lists all the Cuman (Kipchak) words of the Codex Cumanicus and their equivalents in our community's Mišär. Cuman and Mišär stand side by side, so you can see how much of…
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Russification
Russification is a form of cultural assimilation in which non-Russians adopt Russian culture and the Russian language as a result of state policy. It was pursued by both the Russia…
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Crimean Tatars
The Crimean Tatars are the indigenous people of the Crimean peninsula, whose fate has been especially tragic. They are closely related to other Turkic peoples of Kipchak origin.
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The fall of Kazan and Tatarstan
The history of the Tatars in Russia reaches back to the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan by Ivan IV in 1552. Despite centuries of subjugation, the Tatars have managed to preserve t…
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The Finnish Tatars
The Finnish Tatars are Finland's oldest Muslim community — Mišär Tatars who migrated to Finland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the villages of the Sergach country i…
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Definitions of the Estonian Tatars
In Estonia the word “Tatar” covers several different groups with different relationships to Estonia. For clarity, a distinction is drawn between an Estonian Tatar and a Tatar in Es…
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Lend-Lease and the Soviet Union in the Second World War
Lend-Lease was a United States program through which the U.S. (and, in parallel, Great Britain) supplied its allies during the Second World War, including the Soviet Union, with mi…
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Umugulsum Zarip
Umugulsum Zarip (in the exile Estonian press also Ömögölsön Zarip) was an Estonian Tatar (Mišär Tatar), a physician and an active community member in exile. She was a daughter of t…
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Ibrahim Zarip
Ibrahim Zarip (7 October 1925, Tallinn – 22 September 1994) was an Estonian Tatar (Mišär Tatar), a “Finnish Boy” (soomepoiss) and an exile politician. In Sweden he served on the bo…
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28 September 1939: A dance of death between two devils under Satan's gaze
On 28 September 1939 two sets of negotiations ran almost simultaneously in the Moscow Kremlin, both of which sealed the fate of the Republic of Estonia: the German–Soviet Boundary…
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The Estonian Tatar community in the Republic of Estonia (1918–1940)
The Estonian Tatars are chiefly Mišär Tatars who migrated to the territory of Estonia from the second half of the 19th century onward, mostly as merchants. During the interwar Repu…
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How the Mišär Tatars came to Tallinn
The community has passed down the following oral tradition about its origins:
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The cultural genocide of the historical Estonian Tatars
The cultural genocide of the historical Estonian Tatars by the occupying Soviet Union's officials in Estonia either through state policy or gross negligence.
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