The Tatars’ religious manuscripts have been researched more or less since the half of the 19th century. A lot of manuscripts have been described since this time, a lot of them still wait for being described.
In order to complete existing studies with new facts, I have conducted field work researches in the society of Tatars in Podlachia. The aim was to record the presence and the character of manuscripts owned by private people. The researches were conducted in the places of Bohoniki, Sokółka, Białystok and Suchowola.
Among the manuscripts owned by the Tatar families of Podlachia, chamaiły have the dominating role. They are 70 to 150 years old. These manuscripts were copied manually by particular family ancestors or were given to a family.
The tradition of copying religious manuscripts has not vanished completely here. At present, it is still kept by the imams, Konstanty Szczęsnowicz from Sokółka and Stefan Jasiński from Białystok, for example. They copy the prayerbooks for their own use (to perform the imam’s duties) and for believers’ use.
Although each of the discovered prayerbooks, descibed in the register made by me, comes from the last period of the Tatars’ literature, it is of a great value both for the families who own them and for researchers. The features of the new, uncatalogued manuscripts can make it possible to complete the previous researches on the literature of Polish–Lithuanian Tatars, and maybe also to draw new conclusions and theories.
Šis kūrinys yra platinamas pagal Kūrybinių bendrijų Priskyrimas 4.0 tarptautinę licenciją.
