Another Tatar invasion after 780 years!

With the Museum of Ethnography closed due to the move and the epidemic we were unable to receive visitors, therefore we focused our energies on something else and began a number of research projects. One such project was to process a collection of Bulgarian Tatar shawls from the museum's Europe collection. Following the legendary ethnographer István Györffy, we first visited Bulgaria in 2023 to learn about the origin and community of the shawls, and then in May and June 2024 we conducted a more thorough fieldwork to complete the data on the objects, which are inscribed with the name of the renowned ethnographer.

For us Hungarians, there are only a few stereotypical associations of the Tatars that we know from history lessons. We cannot really talk about a homogeneous Tatar population, but there are Tatar groups living in several places in the world, in small and large communities, mostly in Russia: in Tatarstan, but there are also Tatars in Siberia and in the Crimea. 
In addition, there are Tatars in the former Soviet successor states, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, as well as in Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania and even America. For us, the Tatar communities from the Crimea and in the north-east of Bulgaria were of interest for this research project.

They are the descendants of the Crimean Tatars who, after the Crimean War (1853-56), fled the peninsula to escape forced conversions and dispossession. As a result of the persecutions, the Crimean Tatars settled partly on the Black Sea coast and in the Danube Delta region (this historical region is called Dobruja) and partly in Bulgaria, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Here they started a new life in the areas south of the Danube. The Ottomans scattered the Tatar quarters in the surrounding Turkish and Bulgarian settlements, mainly to protect the borders. Today, the majority of Tatars live in the north-eastern part of the country, in strong, enduring communities, and to this day retain their Crimean Tatar roots and identity.

István Györffy, during his collecting trips to the Balkans in 1910, more than a hundred years ago, came to some of the settlements where Crimean Tatars lived. As a result, the Museum of Ethnography has an exceptionally rich collection of more than 300 Tatar shawls. To this day, very little is known about these beautiful hand-woven and embroidered shawls.

The aim of our fieldwork was primarily to "give voice" to this unique collection, through the members of the source community, who provided us with an insight into their holidays and everyday life.

During our conversations, we found out, among other things, that these shawls were of great importance in the wedding customs of Tatar families. They were part of the dowry (in Bulgarian чеиз, in Turkish and Tatar ҫeyiz), which girls started weaving and embroidering at a very young age. Such shawls are no longer made, but some people still keep them as a legacy. We were received with surprising and touching enthusiasm and love by the small Bulgarian Tatar community. They are extremely grateful for the interest shown in them since for almost two hundred years they have experienced mainly hostility, violent assimilationist tendencies, or better still indifference and invisibility. Perhaps that is why they have developed communities that have provided a genuinely strong safety net for their members. "It is only in the last twenty years that we have been able to define ourselves freely, to find out who we are. We read, we learn. We try to do our best not to lose our traditions," Mrs Ayten Ibryamova, who lives and works in Sofia, Vetovo, and was one of the main people who helped us organize the event. Following her recommendations, we were passed from one person to another in the field during our very exciting research.

The pictures are a narrow selection of the hundreds that were taken during our fieldwork. A handful of Tatar people who spared no time, delved into their own memories, reflected with us on the past, present and future of the Tatars, and shared a wealth of knowledge with us to be housed and preserved in the museum in the form of objects, images, recordings and descriptions.

Text and field pictures: Paréj Gabriella, Zatykó Vivien

Photos of the objects: Kardos Judit

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