Osmołowo (Bel. Asmolava) is a village located near the town of Kletsk (Pol.=Bel. Kleck) in the eastern territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (today south-west Belarus). Since the middle of the 16th century it had been the centre of the Tatar settlement in the Kletsk Duchy which was the property of the Radziwiłł noble family. The only Tatar cemetery that has been preserved in Osmołowo until today had been founded at the beginning of the 19th century. The oldest grave with an inscription dates back to 1805. We have discovered 27 inscriptions from the 1st half of the 19th century The epigraphical tradition in Osmołowo at that time represented similar trends as in other cemeteries of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatar gentry. The inscriptions had been composed of Arabic or Turkish confessional formulas (mainly shahada) and of the information about the deceased (name, date of death, military ranks, family affiliation) in Polish, written in Latin and/or Arabic script. In the next decades of the 19th century, the inscriptions developed in the same way as in other cemeteries of the small-town communities of the Tatars during this period which meant that the Arabic script was used both for the confessional section and informative section (in Polish or Belorussian), and introduction of more varied Arabic or Turkich eschatological formulas as ayat 3:182, and Turkish invocations Allāh raḥmet eylesin (Tur. “Let the God have mercy”), ey ğennet müyesser eyle (Tur. “O, paradise, be accessible”) which eventually transformed into Allāh raḥmet eyle ğennet firdeuse (Tur.-Per. “O, God, have mercy, heaven, paradise”).
The culture of Polish-Lithuanian Tatars in the Vilnius regionThe article analyses the culture of the Tatars who came to the Vilnius region centuries ago. In 1945, most of the Tatars from the region decided to go to Poland during the process of repatriation, because they were entitled to do so as Polish citizens.First, the article provides a description of the Tatars’ Muslim religion: the Quran, the doctrine and the dogmas of Islam, mosques, imams and their religious functions, festivals, and prayers. The subsequent part analyses Tatar’s symbolic culture: science, writing, language diversity, legends and superstitions, professions; material culture: clothes, cuisine, the interiors of mosques and grave adornments; as well as their rituals and ceremonies: giving names to children, weddings, funerals, rites of brotherhood, sacrifice.All names and the terminology are given in their official and colloquial versions, as well as in the version “that is used / was used in everyday conversations”. This shows the influence of the linguistic environment, which began already in the area of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Бытовой уклад польско-литовских татар на ВиленщинеВ статье представлены черты бытового уклада общества татар, столетия назад осевших в Виленском крае. Большая часть татарского населения этих мест, имея польское гражданство, воспользовалась правом «репатриации» в Польшу. Автор знакомит нас с основами мусульманской религии татарского населения и, в этой связи, в доступной форме напоминает основы Корана, говорит о доктрине и догматах ислама, о мечети, имаме и функциях имамов (выполняемых ими религиозных услугах), о праздниках и молитвах. В последующих подразделах описывается духовная культура – наука, письменность, языковая разнородность, легенды, суеверия, профессиональная деятельность; материальная культура – одежда, кухня, убранство мечетей, могил, а также обряды – наречение ребёнка именем, бракосочетание, похороны, побратимство, жертвоприношение. Очень важным является закрепление ономастических определений и терминов в рассматриваемой тематике, представляемых в официальной и разговорной версиях, а также в версии «так, как произносят / произносили». Это отображает влияния языковой среды, закрепившиеся в прошлом, ещё на землях Великого княжества Литовского.
In Muslim culture, “white magic” occupies a special place. Although prohibited by Islam as such, there are some areas of it that have been used for centuries and prove to be stronger than the official prohibitions. Love magic belongs to them. Its methods have been practiced in Muslim cultures “since forever” and included both pre- and extra-Muslim elements, as well as those related to Islam. These methods range from physical activities to magic formulas that incorporate Muslim elements, as well as texts that are only understood by a narrow group of magicians. These were therefore amulets, talismans, magic squares and special formulas and prayers, as well as strings of letters and secret signs known from classic Arabic magic books. All these elements can be found in the love magic of Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, and their examples are the methods of love magic included in the 19th-century Aleksandrowicz’s khamail. In this study, I will present 13 magical texts, transcribing them from the record in Arabic and providing an appropriate religious and anthropological commentary. I will also try to find sources and analogies to the methods and formulas used by the Tatars both in the old Arab-Muslim texts and in the people’s beliefs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
The Polish-Lithuanian Tatars began to form their own literature in the Polish and Old Byelorussian languages from the end of the 16th century. All Tatar texts were handwritten exclusively in Arabic script, irrespective of their own language. Tatar writings were characterized by the anonymity of the author but we know the author of the most important literary achievement of this community – the complete translation of the Qur’an dated 1686: the imam of Minsk, Urjasz b. Ism‚‘īl Szlamowicz. Most of the Tatar texts were translated from the Islamic popular religious literature spread in the land of the Golden Horde and Ottoman Empire. The appearance of this sort of Tatar oeuvre resulted from the fact that the Tatars had lost their native tongue sometime within the 16th and 17th c. This made the translation of the popular Islamic literature necessary to preserve the Tatars’ own religion. The Tatar manuscripts also contain an important component adopted from the Old Polish Christian literature including the Polish translation of the Bible by Szymon Budny (1572) created for the Arians – the most radical protestant movement in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Tatars integrated a significant amount of motifs and ideas of their Christian social environment into their religious Islamic traditions. Therefore we can assume that another factor that contributed to the rise of the Tatar literature was the religious and cultural revival which encompassed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th c. during the Renaissance and Reformation era. Apparently it played an important role in the cultural integration of this Turkic-Islamic community with local Christian society and culture.
At the end of the 18th century, the first depiction of a mosque and of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars was created – a drawing by the popular artist of historical and religious painting of the King Stanisław August Poniatowski’s era and the founder of the Vilnius painting school, Franciszek Smuglewicz, “The Mosque of the Tatars and their service”. Made with ink, despite its small size, it shows with great precision the interior of the mosque in Łukiszki near Vilnius and the praying Tatars there. For a long time, it was dated to 1781, but in light of the current findings on the life of Franciszek Smuglewicz, the date of the drawing needs to be moved to 1785 or 1786. It is an excellent iconographic document containing many reliable details, such as the Tatar clothes, the imam’s outfit, their prayer gestures and items used during prayer, the minbar with forms borrowed from rococo church furniture, spatial arrangement of the prayer room, longitudinal division of the interior of the mosque into a male and female hall separated by a wall with a sight gap covered with a curtain, stripes stretched on the floor cloths used instead of prayer rugs, candlelight, prayer benches for the disabled. For the first time (and the only time, until the photographic documentation from the 20th century), publics who had no direct contact with the Tatars could come into contact with their religious practices and the temple’s interioring was not widespread for a long time. Along with twenty other similar views of Vilnius, it was included in an album that belonged until the 19th century to the Jaszczołd family from the Kingdom of Poland. In 1843, the Russian army’s lieutenant of the corps of engineers, Jan Jaszczołd (d. 1858), made it available to prof. M. Homolicki in Vilnius, described the contents of the album (but without discussing the depiction of service in the mosque). Jan Jaszczołd was a son of Wojciech Jaszczołd (d. 1821), a Polish painter and decorator who had been trained by Smuglewicz – this can explain why the album with views Vilni s was eventually found in Jaszczołd family. Later, the Jaszczołd album found its way to the collection of Emeryk Hutten-Czapski at the National Museum in Krakow. Only then (in 1912) the drawing could reach a wider audience, as it was published in black and white photographic reproduction. It is worth adding that the entire album, including the discussed view of the service in Łukiszki, was commissioned by Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski.
Artykuł omawia zespół notatek rodzinnych powstałych w kręgu tatarskiej rodziny Baranowskich na Litwie, dotyczących wydarzeń rodzinno-religijnych z lat 1857–1867 oraz praktyki odczytywania w intencji zmarłych krewnych 36. sury Koranu Ja.Sin. Dokumenty te stanowią uzupełnienie obrazu religijności Tatarów w zakresie, którego nie rejestruje rękopiśmiennictwo, pozwalają ustalić niektóre fakty dotyczące budowy i funkcjonowania meczetu na Łukiszkach w Wilnie, a przede wszystkim przynoszą nieznane informacje o trzech pokoleniach rodziny Baranowskich i członkach kilku innych rodzin, ważnych dla historii Tatarów na Litwie.
EN
The article discusses a collection of family notes written in the Tatar circle of the Baranowski family in Lithuania regarding family and religious events from 1857 to 1867, and the practice of reading Surah 36 Yasin of the Quran on behalf of the dead relatives. These documents supplement the picture of Tatar religiosity to the extent that manuscripts do not record, they allow to establish some facts about the construction and operation of the Lukiškės mosque in Vilnius, and above all, bring unknown information about three generations of the Baranowski family and members of several other families important to the history of Tatars in Lithuania.
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