kruszyniany mosque in kruszyniany, poland. this is the oldest lipka tatar mosque in poland.
the town of kruszyniany was assigned to tatars who participated on the side of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth in their war against the ottoman empire. after lipka tatars settled in the city, they built this mosque, most likely in the late eighteenth century; though there are documents which mention it going back to 1717. the village was settled by repatriates and belarusian muslims following world war ii.
“A grandmother and her grandson in the family home in Sari Bash, a village in the Crimean steppe where Tatars were given virtually worthless land. The village is a former prison camp with very poor infrastructure.”
Photographed by Carolyn Drake in Crimea, Ukraine. 2006.
Note: Though she performed a concert in Moscow on the day the Ukraine invasion began, she was reported to have left the country. She also released an anti-war music video to her 2017 song “Don’t Shoot”, while also removing all of her other songs from her YouTube channel.
"Kryashens (Kryashen: кряшенняр, Tatar: керәшен(нәр), [k(e)ræˈʃen(nær)], Russian: кряшены; sometimes called Baptised Tatars(Russian: крещёные тата́ры)) are a sub-group of the Volga Tatars, frequently referred to as one of the minority ethnic groups in Russia. They are mostly found in Tatarstan and in Udmurtia, Bashkortostan and Chelyabinsk Oblast. They are considered different to the larger group of Tatars that have converted to Christianity.
Kryashens are Orthodox Christians and some of them regard themselves as being different from other Tatars even though most Kryashen dialects differ only slightly from the Central dialect of the and do not differ from the accents of the Tatar Muslims in the same areas. Tatar language.
The 2010 census recorded 34,882 Kryashen in Russia.
Ethnographers and historians associate the formation of groups of Kryashens with the process of voluntary and violent Christianization in the 16-19 centuries. However, according to the theological researcher from St. Petersburg, Evgeny Barkar, the Kryashens are the descendants of pagan Kipchaks who did not convert to Islam."