1 The History of Muslims in Poland

The presence of mosques and Muslim cemeteries within the boundaries of the modern Polish state is linked to the history of Tatar settlement in the territories of Eastern Europe, and its origins date back to the fourteenth century. These mosques were erected, and cemeteries were established by Tatar Muslims who came from the Golden Horde, a state founded by the descendants of Genghis Khan who settled in the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Golden Horde, whose rulers had been practising Islam since the thirteenth century (Borawski and Dubiński 1986, 15), at that time shared a common border with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL), with which it was alternately at war or in an alliance against common enemies. Vytautas, Grand Duke of Lithuania, began to systematically settle the Tatars in the GDL territories in the fourteenth century (Tyszkiewicz 1989, 158n): mainly mercenaries (Kryczyński 2000 [1938], 17), but political refugees from the Golden Horde and prisoners of war also reached his lands. Those who fought in the Lithuanian army against the enemies of the Grand Duchy were granted land as fiefs in return for their military service, and over time their socio-legal status was equated with that of the Lithuanian nobility. Tatars of lower social status served in the estates of magnates or were craftsmen, gardeners, or translators of oriental languages (Konopacki 2010, 42n).

From 1386, a personal union in the form of a common king connected the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the then Polish state, i.e. the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, and from 1569 both of these state organisms comprised the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the seventeenth century, the king of the Commonwealth, Jan III Sobieski, gave the Tatars land along with the obligatory military service in the territory of present-day Poland, in Podlasie, in exchange for the outstanding soldiers’ pay, for which he did not have money (Sobczak 1987, 51–53). These Tatars arrived from Lithuania and brought their established way of functioning in local society, including religious freedom, and began building mosques and creating cemeteries. The Constitution of 1791 granted them full rights and made them completely equal with the nobility. When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lost its independence in 1795 due to the partitions carried out by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, the lands inhabited by the Tatars were incorporated into the Russian Empire.

Poland regained its independence in 1918 and within its borders were territories inhabited by the Tatars, of whom there were about 5,500. Within the borders of the reborn Republic of Poland, there were nineteen pre-partition Muslim communities. In 1925, the (Sunni) Muslim Religious Union in the Republic of Poland, one of the oldest Muslim organisations in Europe, was established, uniting Muslims in Poland and operating on the basis of local Muslim communities.¹ In 1936, the Act on the Relationship of the State to the Muslim Religious Union in the Republic of Poland regulated the functioning of this organisation and provided official recognition of Islam as a religion, counting it among seven recognised denominations financed by the state (Nalborczyk and Borecki 2011, 347).

World War II brought great changes to the life of Polish Muslims – many material monuments were destroyed, and the NKVD arrested or deported practically the entire Muslim intelligentsia deep into the USSR to labour camps, where many of them died (Tyszkiewicz 2002, 147–149; Chazbijewicz 1997). Following the agreements made by the great powers at Yalta in February 1945, the borders of Poland were moved westwards. Consequently, only 10% of the areas of the traditional Tatar settlement remained within these borders. Most traditional Tatar settlements were incorporated into the USSR and located within the Lithuanian SSR, Belarusian SSR and Ukrainian SSR. A significant number of Tatars, as pre-war Polish citizens, were resettled in the so-called Western Territories, which had belonged to the Third Reich before the war but had been part of Polish state bodies in different historical periods. There they had to reorganise their religious life under the conditions of a socialist state (Nalborczyk and Borecki 2011, 348–349).

Since the 1980s, when students from Arab countries first arrived, the ethnic structure of the Polish Muslim minority began to change, and immigrant groups gained the majority: former Arab students, their families, newcomers from Chechnya, Bosnia, Turkey, South Asia and Arab countries. Still, Muslims remain a quantitatively small group in Poland, about thirty-five to forty thousand people (estimates), constituting 0.09–0.1% of the total population. After years of the socialist state’s reluctant attitude towards religion in general, the changes of 1989 also brought about religious freedom and the unhindered establishment of religious organisation structures. According to the new legislation, new Muslim denominational organisations were registered: the Muslim League in the Republic of Poland (Sunni), the Muslim Unity Society (Shi’a), the Ahl-ul-Bayt Islamic Assembly (Shi’a) and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association.²

2 Tatar Mosques and their History

One of the manifestations of religious freedom that Muslim Tatar settlers enjoyed initially in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the right to organise their religious life, including the erection of mosques (Borawski 1980, 43f). There are only two historical Tartar mosques in Poland today, but there were many more such constructions within the borders of the Polish state in the past.

3 The Design of Tatar Mosques

The Tatars from the Golden Horde who appeared in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were primarily warriors, soldiers of various ranks and craftsmen (mostly tanners or gardeners). They did not bring with them skills such as the construction of buildings, so they employed local carpenters to erect mosques. Thus, the mosques are similar to the Orthodox churches they also built (see fig. 5.1 and 5.6).²⁷ Additionally, as mentioned above, the local dżemiats were rather poor; hence the mosques erected by their members were simple and small. Built of wood, they were easily destroyed, mainly by fires, but also due to warfare. Therefore, it was not uncommon to erect successive mosques on the same site, and those that are there today are already successive mosques. Their form stems from local conditions and the shape of buildings observed during visits to Muslim countries, especially Turkey.

Tatar mosques are built on a square or rectangular plan. The most common form is a building on a square plan, covered with a hipped pavilion roof and topped in the centre of the roof with a gloriette dome (see fig. 5.2) as a residual form of a minaret: and such is the shape of the mosque in Bohoniki (see fig. 5.6).²⁸ The mosque in Kruszyniany, on the other hand, is built on a rectangular plan,²⁹ with a gabled roof and a gloriette on the ridge (see fig. 5.1). However, what distinguishes it is two minaret towers on either side of the entrance to the female section, which many architectural historians associate with church towers.³⁰ Each mosque has a metal crescent on top of the gloriette (see fig. 5.2) and every tower, if there is one, a strictly Muslim element visible from a distance. The walls, made using corner-notched log construction, are boarded from the outside, painted green or brown, and the windows with white frames often have pointed arches.

The division into one section for men and another for women (called babiniec, as in synagogues) has been characteristic of Tatar mosques for a long time, already in existence in the 16th century, as we read in the Risāle:

In some local mosques, there is a separate room for women in the shape of a chamber, separated from men. Men are not allowed to enter so as not to violate the law prohibiting praying with women. (Risāle-i Tātār-i Leh 1558, 17 [257])

The women’s section usually has a separate entrance, separated from the men’s section by a wall with a longitudinal window at the height of about 1.5 m, covered by a curtain (see fig. 5.3). This division in Kruszyniany and Bohoniki runs along the transverse axis, but it can also be alongside the longitudinal one (e.g., Sorok Tatary or Rejże). At the back of each section, there are benches for the elderly and non-Muslim visitors. Both mosques have a mihrab, a recess built into the wall like an apse (see fig. 5.1), and a wooden minbar (see fig. 5.7).³¹ In the nineteenth century, the wooden walls were already adorned with muhirs, i.e. paintings or embroidered fabrics with Qur’anic verses or prayers, made by local Tatars (see fig. 5.4); there were also muhirs printed in Kazan (Miśkiewicz and Kamocki 2004, 103). Nowadays, large-scale photos of Islam’s holy places, the Al-Ka‘ba or the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, and devotional decorative fabrics or prints brought from Muslim countries replace them more and more often (see fig. 5.6). Carpets donated by wealthy members of the community lie on the floor.³²

4 Muslim Tatar Cemeteries

The Muslim legacy in the Polish landscape also includes Tatar cemeteries called mizar (miziar; from Arab. mazar – ‘place of visit’ most probably through Tur. mezar – ‘grave’) or zireć (from Arab. ziyarat – ‘visit’). Within each Muslim local community, dżemiat, there was a cemetery, one or even several.³³ The sixteenth-century document already mentioned says:

As observed in Istanbul, we have our graves by the mosques, but beautiful inscriptions, reminiscent of the deceased and this world’s instability, do not adorn our tombstones. (Risāle-i Tātār-i Leh 1558, 18 [258])

Initially built around the mosques, cemeteries were sometimes moved outside the settlement due to lack of space, usually to a hill. There are still four historic Muslim cemeteries used in Poland: one in Kruszyniany and one in Bohonki (both outside the villages), and two in Warsaw.³⁴ There are separate sections reserved for Muslims in communal cemeteries in Gdańsk, Wrocław, and Poznań – these are places of post-war Tatar settlement without historical burial sites. The two Muslim cemeteries in Warsaw, namely the Muslim Tatar Cemetery at 8 Tatarska Street and the Muslim Caucasus Cemetery at 60 Młynarska Street, were both established in the nineteenth century for Muslim soldiers in the Russian army, mostly of Tatar origin (see fig. 5.10), Muslim merchants, or officials working for the Russian imperial administration (Kołodziejczyk 1998, 43). The initiative of Warsaw’s imam Seifetdin Chosianov Sinnajev resulted in establishing the Muslim Tatar Cemetery in 1867 (see fig. 5.8 and 5.9).³⁵

Some historical cemeteries are no longer in use. The one in Lebiedziewo-Zastawek is one of the oldest Tatar cemeteries preserved in Poland, and its creation dates back to the end of the seventeenth century. The cemetery has preserved fifty-three graves from the eighteenth to the twentienth centuries. It belonged to the “parish” in Studzianka, where another mizar is no longer in use (see fig. 5.21) – the last grave is from 1927 (Drozd 2016, 17).

Traditionally, Tartar graves were surrounded by field stones (see fig. 5.15) and had two gravestones: a smaller one over the deceased’s legs and a larger one at the head, with inscriptions on the outside of the stone. According to Risāle, until the sixteenth century, the tombstones of Tatars were devoid of inscriptions; the oldest tombstones with inscriptions date from the mid-seventeenth century (Kryczyński 2000 [1938], 227). However, Andrzej Drozd (2016, 9) recorded a gravestone with inscriptions as early as 1626. Initially, even stones with inscriptions were small and contained only the details of the deceased, often without dating; from the eighteenth century onwards, larger stones with richer information and dating appear. On these gravestones, we find preserved inscriptions in Arabic, Polish, and sometimes Turkish. Until the nineteenth century, the Arabic alphabet was also sometimes used for writing the text in Polish (see fig. 5.23).³⁶ Initially, the Arabic script was used to record religious formulas and the deceased’s details; only the date was in Latin script (Drozd 2016, 17). In the nineteenth century, the deceased’s details were in Latin script (often with an officer’s rank added – see fig. 5.14), and only religious formulas used the Arabic alphabet (Drozd 2016, 19). Typical Muslim elements on the tombstones include shahada, basmala, and various Islamic invocations – for example, ya Allah (Arab. ‘Oh God!’), Allah rahmet (Tur. ‘God’s mercy’). From the second half of the nineteenth century, a crescent was used (see fig. 5.22) to signify the deceased’s religious affiliation (Drozd 2016, 35–41).

From the second half of the nineteenth century, because of Russification (the lands inhabited by the Tatars came under the Russian Empire), inscriptions in Russian began to appear on the tombstones (see fig. 5.19). With time, tombstones, made by the same stonemasons, started to resemble those in Christian cemeteries, became larger, and were made of carefully shaped stones. In the twentieth century, even images of the dead began to appear (see fig. 5.16), just as on Christian tombstones during this period. In the twenty-first century, due to globalisation and contacts with the wider Umma, a “re-Islamisation” of tombstones occurred. Thanks to the use of computers, rich inscriptions in Arabic appear, quotations from the Qur’an often painted with gold paint, arabesque ornaments, metal crescents on tombstones (see fig. 5.17).

5 Conclusions

As Kim Knott (2005, 21) notes, if religion emerges in a given space, it begins to influence that space, transforming it as a result of its socio-religious character, that is, creating places of worship and other sacralised spaces. A religion operating in a given place therefore shapes the space and sacralizes it, but also cultivates it, since “a sacred space is not merely discovered, or founded, or constructed; it is claimed, owned, and operated by people advancing specific interests”, i.e. its followers (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 15). The presence of a religion in an area is reflected in the landscape, yet the landscape is not just the space itself, but also “a construction and the need to acknowledge the centrality of ‘symbolic landscapes’ which produce and sustain social meaning” (Cosgrove and Jackson, 1987, 96). Adherents therefore regard certain areas of this space as sacred or sacralize them themselves through the erection of sacred buildings or the establishment of cemeteries, for the sacralization of space requires “the cultural labor of ritual, in specific historical situations, involving the hard work of attention, memory, design, construction, and control of place” (Smith 1978, 88). Graves, in turn, play a special role in the anchoring or the rootedness of a religion and its adherents in a given place, for, as Lily Kong (1999, 3; 2001, 215) stresses, “communities emphasized symbolic and religious meanings of graves as focal points of identity, expressions of relationships with the land and as crucial to the practice of religious beliefs and rituals”. It was no different in the case of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars.

Their centuries-long presence was not only the reason for the appearance in the local, central and eastern European landscape of such Muslim elements as mosques and gravestones with Muslim inscriptions in Arabic script, i.e. sacred places planned, erected and cultivated by Muslims. In this space there have also appeared symbols, such as crescents on mosques or on gates leading to mosques or cemeteries, and even the inscriptions ‘Muhammad” and ‘Allah’ on the wall around the Tatar Cemetery in the Polish capital, Warsaw (see fig. 5.8), visible to all who visit the largest and oldest Catholic cemetery in that city, which is located opposite.

These traces are Islamic, but at the same time one can notice local influences, mainly coming from the Christian environment – local materials were used to build mosques, the same as those used to build Catholic and Orthodox churches. The mosques were built by local carpenters, mainly Christians, and their design bears a striking resemblance to local Christian churches (and perhaps even synagogues). Tombstones in Tatar cemeteries are built facing Mecca and according to Turkish tradition have two gravestones, but the Arabic alphabet was also used to write Polish text on them. These gravestones are also proof of a common fate and a shared history: at the same time as in Christian cemeteries, the Russian language appears on them as an expression of widespread forced Russification of the nineteenth century. Over time, tombstones made by local stonemasons began to resemble those in Christian cemeteries, taking a similar form except for the crescent and the shahada instead of the cross or Christian formulas. Muslim Tatars have also adapted the local custom of visiting the graves of relatives but have islamised it and call it ‘giving sielam (Arab. salam)’ to the deceased.

Thus, Tatar mosques and cemeteries in the Polish landscape in the twenty-first century constitute traces of the cultivation of local space by elements, both material and symbolic, of Islamic legacy, but at the same time this legacy has been clearly embedded in the landscape and local society for centuries; it is not alien, but familiar and settled.