Lipka Tatars

The Lipka Tatars (the term Lipka refers to Lithuania; they are otherwise known as Lipkas or Lithuanian Tatars; later referred to as Polish Tatars, Polish–Lithuanian Tatars, Belarusian Tatars, Lipkowie, Lipcani, Muślimi, and Lietuvos totoriai) are a Turkic ethnic group and minority in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus who originally settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania at the beginning of the 14th century.
The first Tatar settlers tried to preserve their Tengrism and sought asylum amongst the pre-Christian Lithuanians. Towards the end of the 14th century, another wave of Tatars—this time, Islamized Turkic populations, were invited into the Grand Duchy by Vytautas the Great. These Tatars first settled in Lithuania proper around Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna and Kaunas, later spreading to other parts of the Grand Duchy that later became part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. These areas comprise parts of present-day Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland. From the very beginning of their settlement in Lithuania they were known as the Lipka Tatars. From the Battle of Grunwald onwards, the Lipka Tatar light cavalry regiments participated in every significant military campaign of Lithuania and Poland.
The Lipka Tatar origins can be traced back to the descendant states of the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate, and Kazan Khanate. They initially served as a noble military caste but later they became urban-dwellers known for their crafts, horses, and gardening skills. Throughout centuries they resisted assimilation and kept their traditional lifestyle. While they remained very attached to their religion, over time they lost their original Tatar language, from the Kipchak group of Turkic languages, and for the most part adopted Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Polish. There are still small groups of Lipka Tatars living in Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as their communities in the United States.
The name Lipka is derived from the old Crimean Tatar name of Lithuania. The record of the name Lipka in Oriental sources permits us to infer an original Libķa/Lipķa, from which the Polish derivative Lipka was formed, with possible contamination from contact with the Polish lipka "small lime-tree"; this etymology was suggested by the Tatar author S. Tuhan-Baranowski. A less frequent Polish form, Łubka, is corroborated in Łubka/Łupka, the Crimean Tatar name of the Lipkas up to the end of the 19th century. The Crimean Tatar term Lipka Tatarłar meaning Lithuanian Tatars, later started to be used by the Polish–Lithuanian Tatars to describe themselves.
Over time, the lower and middle Lipka Tatar nobles adopted the Ruthenian language then later the Belarusian language as their native language. However, they used the Arabic alphabet to write in Belarusian until the 1930s. The upper nobility of Lipka Tatars spoke Polish.
Diplomatic correspondence between the Crimean Khanate and Poland from the early 16th century refers to Poland and Lithuania as the "land of the Poles and the Lipkas". By the 17th century the term Lipka Tatar began to appear in the official documents of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
The migration of Tatars into the lands of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the territories of the Golden Horde began during the 14th century and lasted until the end of the 17th century. There was a subsequent wave of Tatar immigrants from Soviet Russia after the October Revolution of 1917, although these consisted mostly of political and national activists.
Lipka Tatars living in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had about 400 mosques serving them. According to the Risāle-yi Tatar-i Leh (trans: Message Concerning the Tatars of Poland, an account of the Lipka Tatars written for Suleiman the Magnificent by an anonymous Polish Muslim during a stay in Constantinople in 1557–1558 on his way to Mecca) there were 100 Lipka Tatar settlements with mosques in Poland. The largest communities existed in the cities of Lida, Navahrudak, and Iwye. There was a Lipka Tatar settlement in Vilnius, known as Totorių Lukiškės, Tatar quarter in Trakai and in Minsk, today's capital of Belarus, known as Tatarskaya Slabada.
In the year 1672, the Tatar subjects rose up in open rebellion against the Commonwealth. This event was remembered as the Lipka rebellion. Thanks to the efforts of King John III Sobieski, who was held in great esteem by the Tatar soldiers, many of the Lipkas seeking asylum and service in the Ottoman army returned to his command and participated in the military struggles against the Ottoman Empire in the Great Turkish War up to the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, which ended the Ottoman expansion in Europe with their defeat.
Beginning in the late 18th and throughout the 19th century, the Lipkas became successively more and more Polonized. The upper and middle classes in particular adopted Polish language and customs, while the lower ranks became Ruthenized. At the same time, the Tatars held the Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas (Wattad in Tatar), who encouraged and supported their settlement in the late 14th and early 15th century, in great esteem, including him in many legends, prayers and their folklore. Throughout the 20th and since the 21st century, most Tatars no longer view religious identity as being as important as it once was, and the religious and linguistic subgroups have intermingled considerably; for example, the Tatar women in Poland do not practice veiling (wearing headscarf/hijab) or view it as a mandatory religious obligation.
Today there are about 10,000–15,000 Lipka Tatars in the former areas of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The majority of descendants of Tatar families in Poland can trace their descent from the nobles of the early Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Lipka Tatars had settlements in north-east Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, south-east Latvia and Ukraine. Today most reside in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus.
Most of the Lipka Tatars (80%) assimilated into the ranks of the nobility in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth while some lower noble Tatars assimilated to the Belarusian, Polish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian townsfolk and peasant populations.
A number of the Polish Tatars emigrated to the US at the beginning of the 20th century and settled mostly in the north eastern states, although there is also an enclave in Florida. A small but active community of Lipka Tatars exists in New York City. "The Islamic Center of Polish Tatars" was built in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City, and functioned until recently.
After the annexation of eastern Poland into the Soviet Union in 1939 and then following World War II, Poland was left with only 2 Tatar villages, Bohoniki and Kruszyniany. A significant number of the Tatars in the territories annexed by the USSR repatriated to Poland and clustered in cities such as Gdańsk (Maciej Musa Konopacki – patriarch of the Polish Orient), Białystok, Warsaw and Gorzów Wielkopolski totaling some 3,000 people. One of the neighborhoods of Gorzów Wielkopolski where relocated Tatar families resettled has come to be referred to as "the Tatar Hills", or in Polish "Górki Tatarskie".
In 1925 the Muslim Religion Association (Polish: Muzułmański Związek Religijny) was formed in Białystok, Poland. In 1992, the Organization of Tatars of the Polish Republic (Polish: Związek Tatarów Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej) with autonomous branches in Białystok and Gdańsk, began operating.
In Poland, the 2011 census showed 1,916 people declaring Tatar ethnicity.
In November 2010, a monument to Poland's Tatar populace was unveiled in the port city of Gdańsk at a ceremony attended by President Bronislaw Komorowski, as well as Tatar representatives from across Poland and abroad. The monument is a symbol of the important role of Tatars in Polish history. "Tatars shed their blood in all national independence uprisings. Their blood seeped into the foundations of the reborn Polish Republic," President Komorowski said at the unveiling. The monument is the first of its kind to be erected in Europe.
Lipka Tatars' paternal gene pool comprises 15 haplogroups. Some have clear geographical affinities, including Eastern Europe (Crimea) and the Volga–Uralic region (N-Tat, R1a-M458, R1a-M558, R1b-M412 and R1b-M478), Central Asia (R1a-Z2125 and Q-M242), South Siberia (Q-M242 and R1b-M478), the Caucasus and the Middle East (G2a-U1, J1-P58, J2a-M410 and J2b-M12).
Dominant Y-DNA haplogroups among Lipka Tatars are R1a (49—54 %) and R1b (10 %) – both Eastern European and Steppe Asiatic one – J2 (18,9 %) which is of Middle Eastern and south Asian origin, and haplogroup Q (10,8 %). Other haplogroups are G (8.1 %), N (5.4 %) and J1 (2.7 %).
According to the whole genome sequencing, around two-thirds of the Lipka Tatar genomes are composed of the European and Middle Eastern/Caucasus components, with remaining one-third belonging to two sub-variants of the general east Eurasian component: east Asian and Siberian. Taken together, both PC and ADMIXTURE analyses suggest the presence of a significant amount of east Eurasian-specific alleles among the autosomal genomes of Lipka Tatars.
Two distantly related members of the Abakanowicz family