HERBARZ-L Archives

From: "David Zincavage" <>
Subject: Re: Tartars in Lithuanian Nobility
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 10:38:24 -0700
References: <2409A35B3E1C8D4D929583798DF5AA78D7D1AB@whmail01.walterhav.com>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leon Stevens" <>
To: <>
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 8:54 AM
Subject: RE: Tartars in Lithuanian Nobility

The actual extent to which any Lithuanians were linguistically polonized
varied somewhat by region, and a great deal by education and social class.
Even the lower gentry in Western Lithuania were little polonized, and the
peasantry were not polonized at all.

> Dumin says that the Tatars
> quickly became linguistically and culturally Slavized and eventually
> Polonized.

If one deals regularly with the lists of armigerous families in the armorial
compendia, one finds there exists very commonly a homonymous family of
Tartar origin using the very same arms as an older Lithuanian armigerous
family. This state of affairs is so frequent that I doubt that a claim that
most families of Tartar ancestry used tamga arms would prove sustainable
upon examination. Original Tartar heraldic charges would be classified as
tamga, but if one glances through Dziadulewicz and other references, I think
one might well be inclined to classify these into two categories: charges
resembling Lithuanian, Polish, and Bohemian tamga charges, like Kosciesza or
Odrowaz, and tamga forms with no close parallels at all in the heraldry of
Christian Central Europe.

> Many Tatars adopted
> topographic surnames ending in "-ski" but many or most others formed
> Belarusified surnames by adding "-ewicz/-owicz" to the names of
> ancestors to form names such as "Chazbiejewicz," "Halimowicz,"
> "Jozefowicz" etc. Most Tatar "arms" remained non-heraldic property
> signs or "tamgas."

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