An oriental Polish group



Abstract

An unquestionable phenomenon is the fact of existing in Poland, the country of the tradition of “the bulwark of Christendom”, a small community of Muslim Tatars who settled down as defenders of Polish eastern borders also against their Tatar and Turkish co-believers. The very group has been totally Polonicised, however, maintained its own religion. They remained faithful to Poland, also in the 19th century when Poland stayed under rules. As a recognition of their patriotism, a special unit of cavalry, maintaining the tradition of Polish Tatar army, was created in the inter-war period in the Polish army. Unfortunately, the number of Polish Tatars in the 20th century has decreased significantly. After the World War I and gaining independence out of 11 000 Polish Tatars, half of them was beyond Poland (in Lithuania and Soviet Bielorussia), and after the World War II, when their main headquarters were in the areas occupied by Soviets, many of them were expatriated into the remaining Polish territories, settling down, among others, in the area of north-eastern Poland that was closest to their settlement so far. They recreated here their social and religious life in which, however, they clearly underlined a religious autocefaly of Polish Tatars and a certain separateness of their Islam from the one of an Arabic type. In a rich bunch of the Polish national culture, Polish Tatars create the most oriental flower.


Published : 2011-12-20


KamockiJ. (2011). An oriental Polish group. Studia Etnologiczne I Antropologiczne, 11, 282-290. Retrieved from https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/SEIA/article/view/9042

Janusz Kamocki  libcom@libcom.pl
Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach  Poland



The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.

1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

2. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

3. User Rights

Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

4. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.