Our feature focuses very much on the Islamic communities in the region south and east of Vilnius, with the emphasis on places which were settled by Tatars during the migration initiated in 1397 by Lithuanian monarch Duke Vytautas the Great. But there have been subsequent migrations of Tatars to the Baltic rim.
In the 19th century, considerable numbers of Mishar Tatars moved from Nizhny Novgorod (Нижний Новгород) and the Volga region to St Petersburg, some then continuing to settle in the Karelian Isthmus and the Grand Duchy of Finland (then part of the Russian Empire). The Mishar community brought Islam to Finland and in time descendants of the Mishar migrants moved on to Sweden.
Like the Lipka Tatars of the eastern Baltic, the Mishars have been linguistically versatile and highly adaptive. Through their capacity to integrate, the Tatar minority was for decades hardly identifiable as such to outsiders. But in Järvenpää, a small town northeast of Helsinki, there is a beautiful wooden mosque built by the Mishar Muslims. Tatars also settled in Estonia in the 18th century, when the tsarist authorities were purposely encouraging migration to the western borderlands. Tatar settlements in Latvia did not come till later.
In the post-Soviet era, Islamic faith communities in both Estonia and Latvia have acquired a new cultural and religious visibility. These other Baltic Muslims, just like the Lipka Tatars featured in the main article, all help attest to the deeply embedded status of Islam in the Baltic region.
Of course, not all Tatars who settled in the Baltic region stayed. Some returned to the regions of southern Russia or the Black Sea littoral whence they or their ancestors had come. Others moved on across the Atlantic to make new lives in the Americas.
The first mosque in New York, housed in a converted Methodist church in Brooklyn, was founded by Lipka Tatars. Sadly it’s no longer in regular use, but the current caretaker Alyssa Ratkewitch is quick to point out that she has strong Tatar roots. “My family comes from Iwye,” she explains — a nice reminder that, even in America, the small homeland is still part of the modern imagination.
