Finnish Tatars
| Regions with significant populations | |
|---|---|
 Finland
|
1,000 |
| Languages | |
| Mishar Tatar, Finnish, Swedish | |
| Religion | |
| Sunni Islam | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Mishar Tatars, Volga Tatars and other Turkic peoples | |
The Tatars of Finland (Mishar:Финляндия татарлары; Finnish: Suomen tataarit Swedish: Finländska tatarer) are ethnic Volga Tatar diaspora in Finland, who espouse the Muslim faith. They number approximately 1,000 and form a well-established and homogeneous religious, cultural and linguistic minority. The Tatars are the oldest Muslim minority in Finland and in the Nordic countries, and operate the Finnish Islamic Congregation (Tatar: Finlandiya Islam Cemaati), the oldest state-recognised Muslim congregation in the Western world. Finnish Tatars (mainly Mishar Tatars) have their historical origins in Eastern Europe and their language belongs to the Turkic language family.
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 at the construction of the Bomarsund fortress in Åland and at the Suomenlinna sea fortress off the coast of Helsinki. Most of those returned to Russia. For the ones who did not, 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 Sergachsky District on the Volga River, to the southeast of Nizhny Novgorod. Most of them had been farmers but they settled in Finland as merchants trading in furs and textiles and chose initially to reside in Helsinki and its surrounding area. Tatars living in the city of Vyborg on the Karelian Isthmus resettled in Tampere and Helsinki when the area was ceded to the Soviet Union in the Moscow Peace Treaty of 1940. Most Finnish Tatars continue to live in Helsinki and its surroundings.
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Wikipedia