| Ilfak Guilfanov • Musa Cälil Elvira Nabiullina • Rinat Akhmetov Rudolf Nureyev • Marat Safin • Rinat Dasayev |
| Total population |
|---|
| c. 6 million (2002) |
| Regions with significant populations |
| Russian Federation: 5,500,000[1]
|
| Languages |
| Religion |
|
Sunni Islam, Eastern Orthodox Christian minority |
The Volga Tatars are the largest subgroup of the Tatars, native to the Volga region. They account for roughly six out of seven million Tatars worldwide. They are in turn subdivided into various subgroups, the largest being the Kazan Tatars, native to Tatarstan proper.
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The majority of Volga Tatars are Kazan (Qazan) Tatars. They are the majority of the population of Tatarstan, one of the constituent republics of Russia.
During the 11th-16th centuries, numerous Turkic tribes lived in what is now Russia and Kazakhstan. The present territory of Tatarstan was inhabited by the Volga Bulgars, a people with uncertain origins The Bulgars settled on the Volga River in the 8th century and converted to Islam in 922 during the missionary work of Ahmad ibn Fadlan. After the Mongol invasion of Europe from 1241, Volga Bulgaria was defeated, ruined, and incorporated into the Golden Horde.
Few of the population survived, nearly all of them moved to northern territories, but it is possible that there was (or wasn't) also some degree of mixing between it and the Cuman-Kipchaks of the Horde during the ensuing period. The group as a whole accepted the language of the Kipchaks and the ethnonym "Tatars" (although the name Bulgars persisted in some places), while the invaders eventually converted to Islam. Two centuries later, as the Horde disintegrated, the area became the territory of the Kazan khanate, which was ultimately conquered by Russia in 1552.
Tatars live in Russia's Kirov Oblast and Tatarstan. Their dialect have many Kozla Mari words and they have admixture of Finno Ugrian Maris. Their number in 2002 was around 5.000 people.
Kazan Tatars live in Russia's Perm Krai. Some also comprise an admixture of Komi Permyaks. Some Tatar scholars (as Zakiev) name them Ostyak Tatars. Their number is (2002) c.130.000 people.
Many Kazan Tatars were forcibly Christianized by Ivan the Terrible during the 16th century, and later, during the 18th century.
Some scientists suppose that Suars were ancestors of the Keräşen Tatars, and they had been converted to Christianity by Armenians in the 6th century while they lived in the Caucasus. Suars, like other tribes which later converted to Islam, became Volga Bulgars, and later the modern Chuvash (who are mostly Christian) and Kazan Tatars (mostly Muslims).
Keräşen Tatars live all over Tatarstan. Now they tend to be assimilated among Chuvash and Tatars. Eighty years of Atheistic Soviet rule made Tatars of both faiths not as religious as they once were. Russian names are largely the only remaining difference between Tatars and Keräşen Tatars.
Some Turkic (Kuman) tribes in Golden Horde were converted to Christianity in the 13th and 14th centuries (Nestorianism). Some prayers, written in that time in the Codex Cumanicus, sound like modern Keräşen prayers, but there is no information about the connection between Christian Kumans and modern Keräşens.
In the 1910s, they numbered about half a million in the area of Kazan. Some 15,000 belonging to the same stem had either migrated to Ryazan in the center of Russia (what is now European Russia) or had been settled as prisoners during the 16th and 17th centuries in Lithuania (Vilnius, Grodno, and Podolia). Some 2,000 resided in St. Petersburg Volga-Ural Tatars number nearly 7 million, mostly in Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union. While the bulk of the population is found in Tatarstan (nearly 2 million) and neighbouring regions, significant number of Kazan Volga-Ural Tatars live in Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Outside of Tatarstan, urban Tatars usually speak Russian as their first language (in cities such as Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Nizhniy Novgorod, Ufa, and cities of the Ural and western Siberia).
Places where Volga Tatars live include:
"Bulgarism" is a term for the position that the Kazan Tatars are significantly descended from the Volga Bulgars or are actual Bulgars that have not mixed. The alternative position assumes that Tatar ethnogenesis was only completed upon the arrival of the Cumans and Kipchaks. Tatarstan was called Bolgaristan until 1919.
The "Bulgarist" position espouses the view that there was very little, or no mixing with Mongol and Turkic aliens after the conquest of Volga Bulgaria, especially in the northern regions that ultimately became Tatarstan. [2][3][4]