Finnish Tatars

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The Finnish Tatar community, about 800 people, is recognized as a national minority by the government of Finland, which considers their language as a non-territorial language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

Their main organizations are the Finnish Islamic Congregation (Finlandiya Islam Cemaati, founded in 1925), the Tatar Cultural Society (Finlandiya Türkleri Birligi, founded in 1935) and the Yolduz sports club (founded in 1945). They even had a Tatar primary school (Türk Halk Mektebi) in Helsinki from 1948 to 1969.

Their ancestors came to Finland from the 1870s to the mid 1920s from a group of some 20 villages in the Sergatch region on the Volga River, to the southeast of Nizhni Novgorod. Those living in the city of Viipuri in Karelia resettled in Western Finland when Karelia was ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union in 1944.

[edit] Source

Frank Horn and Heli Niemi, National Minorities of Finland, The Tatars, Virtual Finland (Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland), June 2004

[edit] See also

• Tatars
• Volga Tatars