HERBARZ-L Archives

From: "Leon Stevens" <>
Subject: RE: Tartars in Lithuanian Nobility
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 12:34:14 -0400

> Concise society <

That's right. A concise society it was, and the Muslim community was
not as "tiny" as it is today. Dziazdulewicz's armorial is divided into
two parts. The first part, from page 1 to page 362 contains Muslim
families. The considerably smaller section, from page 365 to page 455
contains Christian families. (When I said 1/2:1/2, I should have said
5:1 in favor of Muslims in 1929). After Stalin most of the descendants
of these Muslims may be found almost anywhere in Siberia or Tatarstan,
(or unfortunately under the earth). Before the war, most Lithuanian
Tatars were concentrated in the Lithuanian heartland and in eastern
Podlasia. (After all, that's why we call them "Lithuanian Tatars.")
These Tatars maintained contacts with each other as well as with their
distant cousins even beyond the Volga or in the Crimea, just as any
diaspora preserves contacts with kin abroad. Someone has published a
map of Commonwealth Tatar settlements, and they form a fairly tight
constellation mostly in the central former Grand Duchy. I'll look for
the map and make it available to those interested. Until then,
Dziadulewicz has an index of original family properties arranged by
province, and one can see that the central provinces had Tatar
settlements far more densely distributed than outlying ones. I forgot
to mention that the reason the Tatar community became overwhelmingly
Polish-speaking is because the Koran was translated into Polish but the
Polish was written with Arabic letters. Dziadulewicz says that
manuscripts of the Koran so written in Polish but in Arabic characters
could be found in abundance throughout Lithuania (Dziadulewicz p.XXVII).

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