Tatars

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tatars are a Turkic-speaking people found across Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, carrying a name that once meant something far wider and more terrifying than it does today. In medieval Europe, the word Tatar, or Tartar, was applied by cartographers to anyone living across the vast landmass then called Tartary, a region wrongly conflated with the Mongol Empire. The extra r in Tartar was almost certainly no accident: scholars at the Oxford English Dictionary trace it to an association with Tartarus, the underworld of Greek myth. It was a name freighted with dread. Who were the actual peoples behind that label? How did a single name come to stretch across dozens of distinct ethnic groups, from the shores of the Baltic to the forests of Siberia? And what became of those peoples across centuries of conquest, displacement, and survival? The answers reach from the steppe courts of Genghis Khan to the cattle trains of 1944.

• 2. A Name With Many Owners

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  Mahmud al-Kashgari, an 11th-century Kara-khanid scholar, noted that the historical Tatars were bilingual, switching between their own tongue and other Turkic languages. That linguistic flexibility hints at something deeper: the Tatar identity was always porous. The Persian word tatār, meaning "mounted messenger," entered Arabic in the 13th century in reference to the armies of Genghis Khan, and its origin before that remains unknown. The Oxford English Dictionary records that the word is "said to be" ultimately from tata. Western European writers borrowed the term through Turkish and Persian, added a second r, and applied it to everyone from the Volga to Manchuria. Within Russia, different processes were at work. Some Turkic peoples living inside the Russian Empire adopted Tatar as a self-designation; others rejected it entirely. The Yakuts, the Chuvashes, and the Sarts were never called Tatars. Researchers in 2019 proposed that the Turkic-speaking Polovtsians of Cumania adopted the Tatar name as a sign of political allegiance to their Mongol conquerors, before ultimately absorbing those conquerors culturally and linguistically inside the Golden Horde. The name, in that reading, traveled in a direction opposite to conquest.

• 3. The Volga Heartland

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  In the 7th century AD, the Volga Bulgars settled along the Volga-Kama region, moving into lands where Finno-Ugric peoples already lived. They built cities and a culture that endured until Batu Khan's invasion of 1223-1236, when the Golden Horde destroyed Volga Bulgaria. A Russian annalist recorded the assault on the city of Bolgar in 1236 in stark terms: "there came from the countries of the East into the Bulgar lands the godless Tatars and sacked the good city of Bolgar and killed everyone from the old to the young and the tiniest suckling." That annalist's text marks likely the first recorded use of the name Tatar in connection with the region. From that violent beginning, the Kazan Khanate eventually emerged, drawing in migrants from Astrakhan, Azov, Crimea, and Akhtubinsk. During the events of 1438-1445, an estimated 40,000 Tatars arrived with Khan Uluk-Muhammad at once. Ibn Abd al-Zahir al-Umari, the Arab historian known as Al-Omari, wrote that after the Cumans joined the Golden Horde, the Tatar-Mongols gradually mixed with them on the Polovtsian steppe. Within a few generations, he observed, the newcomers began to look like the Polovtsians, "as if from the same (with them) kind." Ivan IV seized Kazan after a six-month siege in 1552, ending the khanate's independence.

• 4. The Lipka Tatars of Lithuania

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  At the beginning of the 14th century, the first Tatars to settle in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania arrived as refugees, trying to preserve their shamanistic religion among the non-Christian Lithuanians who might shelter them. Toward the end of that same century, Grand Duke Vytautas the Great, who ruled from 1392 to 1430, invited a further wave of Muslim Tatars into his domain. These settlers established communities around Vilnius, Trakai, Hrodna, and Kaunas, and became known from the outset as the Lipka Tatars. The Grand Dukes prized them as warriors, and every Tatar settler received szlachta, or nobility, status, a tradition that persisted until the Commonwealth's dissolution in the late 18th century. By the 17th century, various estimates placed the Tatar community in the Commonwealth at roughly 15,000 persons living in around 60 villages, each with a mosque. They were permitted to marry Christians, unusual in Europe at the time. The May Constitution of 1791 gave them seats in the Polish Sejm. Although the community had adopted the Polish language by the 18th century, Islamic practice survived, including the sacrifice of bulls during major religious festivals. Women in Lipka Tatar society traditionally held the same rights as men and could attend non-segregated schools. By the inter-war years, roughly 5,500 Tatars lived within Poland's borders, and a Tatar cavalry unit had fought for Polish independence. The historian Jerzy Lojek and the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, who lived from 1846 to 1916, are among the prominent Polish intellectual figures connected to this community.

• 5. The Crimean Khanate's Rise and Fall

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  In 1441, an embassy from several powerful Crimean clans, including the Golden Horde clans Shirin and Barin and the Cumanic clan Kipchak, traveled to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to invite Haci Giray to rule Crimea. He founded the Giray dynasty, which governed until the Russian annexation of 1783. Haci I Giray was himself a Jochid, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan through his grandson Batu Khan. Under Haci's son Menli I Giray, in 1502, the Crimean Khanate destroyed the "Great Horde," the last remnant of the Golden Horde, and captured its capital Sarai. Menli proclaimed himself Great Khan. At its peak, the Crimean Khanate ranked among the strongest powers in Eastern Europe. Both the Tsardom of Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth paid annual tribute to the khan, Russia until 1700, and Poland until 1699. In 1711, Peter I of Russia marched toward the Black Sea with 80,000 troops and found himself surrounded by the forces of Crimean Khan Devlet II Giray. Peter escaped only because the Ottoman vizier Baltaci Mehmet Pasha negotiated terms over Giray's protests. The Khan's reply to the vizier was pointed: "You might know your Tatar affairs. The affairs of the Sublime Porte are entrusted to me. You do not have the right to interfere in them." Russian armies invaded and devastated Crimea in 1736 under Münnich, burning the Khan's palace at Bakhchisaray along with all its archives, then withdrew due to an epidemic. A year later, another Russian general, Peter Lacy, repeated the destruction. The Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774 ended with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, by which Crimea became formally independent. Russia then violated that treaty and annexed Crimea outright in 1783.

• 6. Deportation and Survival

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  From 1783 until the early 20th century, at least 800,000 Crimean Tatars left their homeland under Russian administrative pressure. In 1917, Crimean Tatar leaders proclaimed the Crimean People's Republic, which they described as the first democratic republic in the Muslim world, granting equal rights to all peoples. Its head was the young politician Noman Celebicihan. The republic survived only months before the Bolsheviks seized Crimea; Celebicihan was killed without trial and thrown into the Black Sea. What followed was a sequence of catastrophes. Soviet grain exports drained Crimea during the famine of 1921-1922, killing at least 76,000 Crimean Tatars. In 1928 the first wave of political repression struck the Crimean Tatar intelligentsia; Veli Ibraimov, head of the Crimean ASSR, was executed on fabricated charges. A second wave in 1938 killed writers, scientists, poets, and teachers including Asan Sabri Ayvazov and Usein Bodaninsky. Then in May 1944, the USSR State Defense Committee ordered every Crimean Tatar deported from Crimea. Families were loaded onto cattle trains and sent to Central Asia, primarily Uzbekistan. During the deportation and its immediate aftermath, 46% of Crimean Tatars died. When Khrushchev rehabilitated deported peoples in 1956, the Crimean Tatars were specifically excluded. A sustained national movement eventually forced the Supreme Soviet, in 1989, to condemn the deportation as inhumane and unlawful. Crimean Tatars began returning to their homeland, and today they constitute approximately 12% of Crimea's population.

• 7. Language and Belonging

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  Genetic studies have found that the three main Tatar groups, the Volga, Crimean, and Siberian Tatars, are apparently unrelated, their identities having formed independently of one another. Their languages reflect that separation. The modern Tatar language, spoken mainly in the Volga-Ural region, forms a Kypchak-Volga-Ural subgroup with Bashkir. It has two dialects: the Central dialect, which forms the basis for literary Tatar, and the Western or Misher dialect spoken by Mishars. The Siberian Tatar language is a distinct entity; its dialects diverge so sharply from standard Tatar and from each other that mutual comprehension is often impossible. Linguists in Kazan tend to classify Siberian Tatar as part of the broader Tatar language, while Siberian Tatars themselves typically reject that claim. Crimean Tatar occupies yet another branch: its closest relatives are Kumyk and Karachay-Balkar, not Kazan Tatar. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, Volga Tatars wrote their literary language in the Iske imla variant of the Arabic script, with regional variation in spelling. The older literary register was dense with Arabic and Persian loanwords. Modern literary Tatar, written today in Cyrillic, has shifted toward borrowings from Russian and other European languages. Outside Tatarstan, urban Tatars in cities such as Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Tashkent typically use Russian as their primary language. An estimated 5.3 million ethnic Tatars live in Russia, with the Volga Tatars making up 53% of Tatarstan's population and continuing to anchor the name that once stretched across a continent.