Impossible to be mistaken: the man seated at the back of the room, with his round face, his matte skin and his almond eyes, is the one we were looking for. Although Polish for generations, Adam Swierblewski, 58, does not merge with the customers of this restaurant on the suburbs of Bialystok, in northeast Poland. He is part of the Tatare ethnic group. Owner, with his wife, also Tatare, of this place named Halva, where you can taste a paste based on sesame or a puff pastry stuffed with beef and potatoes, he designates on the walls of old sepia photos. Portraits of male and women in frock coat or austere black dress that recall old Europe, would have been, here again, the particular features of these ancestors with stretched eyes and dark hair. “I know where I come from, and I’m proud of it”Ogonece Adisi s Headsbleski.
The memory of the Steppes of Asia, the starting point in the 13the A century of tumultuous rides and multiple raids west led by its distant ascending, disappeared. But it was rooted here, years later, in the swamps and primitive forests of the podlachia, along the border with Belarus, where infantrymen of the Horde d’Or founded by Batu (around 1205-1255), the grandson of Gengis Khan (1162-1227), and composed of Mongols and Mongols and Kipchaks, vassal Turkish -speaking tribes, have established each other so that never again again.
Their direct descendants, known as Tatars, always reside there, forming one of the oldest European Muslim minorities. “The first documents attesting to their presence date from 1397”underlines Agata NalBrczyk, head of the Department of Studies on European Islam at the University of Warsaw and author of numerous works and articles on the Tatars. This ethnicity, then dispersed at the crossroads of Lithuania, Belarus and Poland, remained widely overlooked. And discreet. From a Lithuanian father, the American actor Charles Bronson (1921-2003), born Karolis Bucinskis, will never highlight his Tatare origins.
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