Tatar

Tatars (Tatarlar / Татарлар)
Total population
about 10 - 20 million
Regions with significant populations
Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Belarus, Germany, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Romania, Canada, USA,Brazil , Japan and China
Languages
Tatar, Russian , Turkish and other among the diaspora
Religions
predominantly Sunni Muslim, with Christian and Buddhist minorities
Related ethnic groups
other Altaic-Turkic peoples; various peoples of Eastern Europe

Tatars (Tatar: Tatarlar/Татарлар), sometimes spelled Tartar (more about the name), is a collective name applied to the Turkic speaking people of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Most current day Tatars live in the central and southern parts of Russia (the majority in Tatarstan), Ukraine, Poland and in Bulgaria, China, Kazakhstan, Romania, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. They collectively numbered more than 10 million in the late 20th century. Most Tatars are Sunni Muslims, but there are also significant Christian and Buddhist minorities.

The majority - in European Russia - are descendants of Eastern European Volga Bulgars who were conquered by the Mongol invasion of the 13th century and kept the name of their conquerors. Tatars of Siberia are survivors of the once numerous Turkic-Mongolian population of the Ural-Altaic region, mixed to some extent with the speakers of Uralic languages, as well as with Mongols.

The original Ta-ta Mongols inhabited the north-eastern Gobi in the 5th century and, after subjugation in the 9th century by the Khitans, migrated southward, there founding the Mongol empire under Genghis Khan. Under the leadership of his grandson Batu Khan they moved westwards, driving with them many stems of the Turkic Ural-Altayans towards the plains of Russia.

On the Volga they mingled with remnants of the old Bulgarian empire (Volga Bulgaria), and elsewhere with Finno-Ugric speaking peoples, as well as with remnants of the ancient Greek colonies in the Crimea and Caucasians in the Caucasus.

The name of Tatars, given to the invaders, was afterwards extended so as to include different stems of the same Turkic-Mongol branch in Russia, and even the bulk of the inhabitants of the high plateau of Asia and its northwestern slopes, described under the general name of Tartary. This name has almost disappeared from geographical literature, but the name Tatars, in the above limited sense, remains in full use.

The present Tatar inhabitants of Eurasia form three large groups:

• those of Crimea, Bulgaria, European Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Romania and Turkey.
• those of the Caucasus,
• and those of Siberia.

Due to the vast movements and intermingling of peoples along with the very loose utilization of the name Tatar, current day Tatars comprise a spectrum of ethnic groups that looks Mongoloid at one end and Caucasoid at the other. As to the original Tatars from Mongolia, they most likely shared characteristics with the Mongol invaders from Central Asia.