z Trk - (Tatar-Tatarlar-Tatars from Finland) Part 4

The Tatars The Tatars of Finland are a Turkic people who espouse the Muslim faith. They number approximately 800 and form a well-established and homogeneous religious, cultural and linguistic minority. The Tatars are the oldest Muslim minority in Finland and throughout the Nordic countries. They have their historical origins in Turkey and their language belongs to the Turkic group. During the early years of Finland's status as an autonomous Grand Duchy under the Russian Tsars, Tatars were already being employed by the Russians on the construction of the Bomarsund fortress in Åland and the Suomenlinna/Sveaborg fortress on an island off Helsinki. Most of them returned to Russia. For the ones who did not, only an Islamic cemetery in Bomarsund bears witness to their presence in Finland. The ancestors of the present-day Tatars 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,