New Tatar Cultural Centre to Open in Kruszyniany
The Polish Tatar Centre of Education and Muslim Culture is to be set up in Kruszyniany in north-eastern Poland (Podlachia) before mid-2015. The facility will feature a museum and a historical hall.
Construction of the centre, co-financed by EU funds, was supposed to be finished this year. However, the religious community had a problem raising their own contribution, which was necessary to avoid the loss of EU subsidies. In October 2014, the Marshal’s Office of the Podlaskie Voivodeship informed the Polish Press Agency that the missing 150,000 US dollars had been donated to the community by the government of Kuwait.
The cost of building the centre is estimated to be 5.4 million PLN. 3.5 million PLN comes from the EU’s Regional Operational Programme and 250,000 PLN from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. The community’s own contribution was the site on which the centre is to be built. According to what Bronisław Talkowski, the community’s chairman, said to PAP, after long discussions he received a written guarantee of support for the investment from the government of Kuwait, thanks to which construction can start. Talkowski estimates that the centre will be finished by the middle of next year.
The centre is intended to be a place to present the culture and history of the Tatar community. Tatars are one of the smallest ethnic groups in Poland, but their history on the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth dates back over 600 years. Polish mediaeval chronicler Jan Długosz gives the date of 1397 as the beginning of the Tatar’s voluntary settlement in these areas. It was the Tatars who brought Islam to Polish lands, but by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they had already lost their language, and many of their customs and family names had been Polonized.
The non-profit institution will also support research, in cooperation with the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Warsaw and the Institute of History of the University of Białystok. The facility will contain a museum, and a hall for historical and educational workshops, as well as a tourist information point. There will be also an outbuilding for bike storage, which also has two stalls for horses.
It’s unknown exactly how many Tatars currently live in Poland. The Muslim Religious Union in Poland and the Polish Tatar Association for Culture and Education operates within this minority community. The former estimates the number of Polish Muslims of Tatar origin at about 5,000 people. Most of them live in the Podlaskie Voivodeship, where the last two antique mosques and Islamic cemeteries are located in Kruszyniany and Bohoniki.
Source: PAP, ed. PZ, transl. szm, October 2014
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