The Last Village: Muslim Tartars in Poland for 500 years

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Friday, August 20, 2010 | 5 photos

Biography

Although this work constitutes just a small part of my ideas and projects during these years, it is nonetheless representative of my on going focus and strategy in dealing with the world through the photographic image. I try to express the world through my eyes as a personnel witness, a participant in life not just an observer. Dealing with the transient and often surreal aspects of the human condition and the concept of the ‘photographic Journey’ be that emotional or physical as well.Since 2006 I have been struggling to become succesfull in photography,keeping passionate & not giving up.

Synopsis

I am currently working on a long-term project on Chechen refugees in Warsaw.On this trip in March 2010 I decided to also take a long train journey to the edge of Poland,close to the Belarus border to visit a village of Tartar descendants and their 19th Century wooden Mosque.
Although not really known about outside Poland, a small community of Polish Tartars were still living on the edge of Poland and still practising Islam, although their numbers
are dwindling and the village is slowly dying, these proud people still manage to survive and mantain there heritage within Poland.
In a country know to be mainly made up of Catholics and largely homogenous, and as I had been photographing new Muslim immigrants in Poland for the last year, I was very excited to visit the small community of Bohoniki,where Muslim Tartars had been living for 500 years.
In the end I was welcomed with an open heart and curiosity by these almond eyed, round faced and hospitable people, these Tartars with Slavic names and when I returned to Warsaw I saw their features much more clearly in the Polish people and the old saying;" if you scratch a Pole you will find a Tartar inside " rang true.