Thursday, May 26, 2011

Yar Chally - Яр Чаллы






There are many Tatars living in Yar Chally - Яр Чаллы (the Russian name is Naberezhniye Chelny).
T

Kamaz and ZMA trucks are produced there, and the city is one of the largest planned centers in the world related to vehicle production. With more than two square miles dedicated to production, the Kamaz plant is the largest vehicle factory in the world.

SPRUT Technology, JSC. oldest Russian's developers of PC-based  CAx software including SprutCAM was founded at 1987 in Yar Chally.

History of Yar Chally


 The first Russian migrants organized a small settlement Mys Chelny in 1626 on land abandoned by the earlier population, which had lain empty and become overgrown by forest.
 "In the court village of Elabuga on the River Kama in 1626 a peasant commune was formed headed by Fyodor Nefer'ev Popov. The commune resolved having crossed the River Kama to settle on the Ufa side on lands long abandoned by the previous population and lying empty. Here they formed a small settlement on the cape at the confluence of the rivers Chelninka and Melekeska and began to live on arable land, taking advantage of the privilege then established of freedom from quit rent. The peasants were allocated a lot of land: from the upper direction from the River Shil'na and from the lower along the River Bilyanka, between these rivers from the mouth to the heights." Pereyakovich. "The Volga Region in the 17th Century".

Previously a semi-nomadic population had lived here but abandoned these lands which probably occurred in the period following the conquest of the Kazan Khanate.   Why did these lands lie empty?  According to the scribe's book of court lands of 1563 the Khan owned very large patrimonial lands around Elabuga.  On the left side of the Kama there were also lands belonging to the Khan.  This is proved by the fact that after annexation to the Russian state all the Khan's lands were reckoned among court possessions.  By 1651 the village of Mys was already being called a trading settlement.  By that time not only migrants from Russia were living here but also enterprising traders and there were 112 households and 6 mills.  They opened up and worked the empty lands on the left bank of the Kama, sent people for military service to fortified camps of the Zakam'e defence line to protect the region and later also sent peasants to the newly organised Urals factories.

In the 19th century the Berezhnye Chelny quay was a major center for the grain trade.  Up to 1920 it was part of Menzelinsk uyezd of the Ufa province and it became part of the TAASR when it was formed.  From 1922-1930 it was the center of the Chelny canton. From 1982 to 1988 it bore the name Brezhnev.

Ancient times

Ancient Settlement of Chally (Challinskoe Gorodishche)

Situated on the River Kama near Orlovka.  During excavations here Bulgar-made metal plows have been found revealing the early development here of metallurgy and plowing in agriculture.

The settlement is dated by archaeologists to the time of the Golden Horde (13th -14th centuries), but it is entirely possible that Bulgars lived here in an earlier period considering that on the River Ik where it is joined by the River Menzelya there were Bulgar fortifications where they halted the first invasion of Russia by Mongols in 1223.

It is known that in the Golden Horde period on the territories occupied by the Mongols, agriculture ceased.  It is difficult to suppose that in fleeing from the enraged hordes the Bulgars could have taken their metal agricultural implements from their earlier places of habitation to new ones unknown to them. It therefore seems more likely that the Chally settlement arose when the Great Bulgar state was an independent state, that is before 1236-1237.  And it was destroyed by the armies which passed through here in 1395 of one of the last of the descendants of the Genghis Khan Tokhtamysh and his conqueror "the great conqueror the world", Tamerlane or else by the Kazan Khans who seized this part of the Kama shore after them (in the first half of the 15th century)


Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Arabian Nights - Banana Splits



70's American Cartoon shown on the "Banana Splits Show".
Flying Carpets, Arabian Magic, The Khan of Baghdad
and we thought "Rosan Khobarr!" was a Tatar expression.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Tatar California 1976 - Party!

Tatar youth together for a costume party. This pic is dated "November 1976" so it must have been a Halloween party. How do you say Halloween in Tatar?

Tatar California - January 13, 1973


We were all together for Kurban Bayram. When we would get larger crowds like this, we would rent out the Burlingame Women's Club. It's bigger than our Bina.

Fazil Sadri is in the Brown Suit at top picture.

What is a Tatar?

The name 'Tatar', also spelt 'Tartar', means 'archer' and is historically somewhat ambiguous. Over the centuries it has referred to different groups of people. Today it primarily refers to the Turkic people of the Volga region of Russia. There are three main groups of Tatars: the Volga (Kazan), Crimean and the Siberian. Formerly, Kazan Tatars would refer to themselves as 'Bolghar' or simply 'Muslim'. They are now a settled people, mainly peasants or merchants who have totally lost their traditional tribal structure.

It is most likely that the Tatars are descendants of the people called "Bulgars" who arrived in the area of the Volga in the early 8th century AD. They were well established and became a flourishing state. In the 13th century the Bulgar State was conquered by the Mongols, and it eventually became the seat of the Kazan (Tatar) Khanate. During this time it developed as a center of Islamic scholarship. Today there are an estimated 8,324,000 Tatars, the majority (7,121,000) live in Russia. Substantial colonies of Tatars have dispersed since the 1800s to live in nearly every republic of the former Soviet Union, in particular Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Tatars have a wide range of appearances, from fair skin and blue eyes to those resembling Mongols.

(If you ask ten Tatars "What is a Tatar?" you will receive several different answers. - Above is one.)

Social Life in Tatarstan

http://www.slitat.org/sl.html

here

Tatars and other Middle Volga Minorities

...About 81% of European Russia's people are Russians. The rest belong to dozens of smaller ethnic groups, all with their own lan­guages and cultural traditions (in varying degrees of usage), and varied religions. Their complex distribution has been shaped by war, forced movements and migration over many thousands of years. Many ethnic groups have their own republics within Russia , some of which - notably Tatarstan - have developed societies with a character different from the rest of European Russia.

Middle Volga Minorities

The region east of Moscow , around the mid­dle section of the Volga River and its tribu­taries, contains the biggest ethnic minorities, though they're still outnumbered about three to one in the region by Russians. The system of republics in this region stems from Soviet attempts to limit the influence of the Tatars, historical rivals of the Russians.

The region's, and European Russia's, big­gest minority is the Tatars themselves, who are descended from the Mongol-Tatar armies of Jenghis Khan and his successors, and from earlier Hunnic, Turkic and Finno-Ugric set­tlers on the middle Volga. The Tatars are mostly Muslim, and some 1.8 million of them form nearly half the population of the Tatarstan Republic , whose capital is Kazan , on the Volga River . A million or so Tatars live in other parts of European Russia, while a fur­ther million or so live elsewhere in the CIS.

Two other important groups in the middle Volga region are the Chuvash (1.8 million) and the Bashkirs (1.5 million). The Chuvash , descendants of the pre-Mongol-Tatar settlers in the region, are Orthodox Christian and form a majority in Chuvashia (capital: Cheboxary). The Bashkirs are a partly Turkic people, nominally Muslim, about half of whom live in the Bashkortostan Republic (capital: Ufa ). Here, however, they are out­numbered both by Russians and by Tatars.

The other four major groups of the region are Finno-Ugric peoples, descendants of its earliest known inhabitants, and distant rela­tives of the Estonians, Hungarians and Finns: the 1.2 million Orthodox or Muslim Mord­vins, a quarter of whom live in Mordovia (capital: Saransk); the 800,000 Udmurts or Votyaks, predominantly Orthodox, two-thirds of whom live in Udmurtia (capital: Izhevsk); the 700,000 Mari or Cheremys, with an ani­mist/shamanist reliQion, nearly half of whom live in Mary-El (capital: Yoshkar-Ola); and the 350,000 Komi, who are Orthodox, most of whom live in the Komi Republic (capital: Syktyvkar ).

http://www.visaexpress.net/russia/population.htm

Pushkin Museum - Gabdulla Tukay



Pushkin Museum Highlights Tatar Poet Gabdulla Tukay

Crimea - History - Kirim

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Bulgar Dateline - Turkic World

Mari

Mari people are the residents of the Mari Karshi, Higher Potam, and Artimejkovo of the Sverdlovsk region. ... In the South of the region, that is bordering with the Bashkir republic, there are many neighbouring Tatar, Bashkir, and Mari settlements.

Greetings from the Golden Horde - Sarai Batu

This map, indicating Sarai and Grand Bolgar, is from the book "Russia and the Golden Horde"

by Charles J. Halperin 1985







The Astrakhan region can boast of an ancient settlement Sarai Batu – the former capital of the Golden Horde and a major ancient trading center.

In 1333 Arabian travellers mentioned that the settlement was inhabited by Mongols, Kipchaks, Circassians, Russians and Byzantines.