The exhibition about the Muslims of Europe has opened at the Kazan Kremlin

Today at the Museum of Islamic Culture of the Museum-Reserve "Kazan Kremlin" for the first time the exhibition "Turks, Moors, Tatars - Moslems of Prussia and Germany"   has opened.

This is the first exposition, presented within the framework of the long-term international research project "Tatar materials in foreign archives", which is conducted by the Institute of History after  Sh. Marjani of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan. It presents exhibits from eight German institutions: museums, archives, libraries and private collections. Curators of the exhibition - Dr. Stefan Taylig, director of the Brandenburg-Prussian Museum (Wustrau) and Dr. Miste Hotop-Rikke, director of the Institute of Caucasian, Tatar and Turkestan Studies (ICATAT) from Magdeburg.

Organizers of the exhibition: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Tatarstan, the State Historical, Architectural and Art Museum-Preserve "Kazan Kremlin", the Institute of History named after. Sh. Marjani of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan, the Institute of Caucasian, Tatar and Turkestan Studies (Magdeburg), the Brandenburg-Prussian Museum (Wustrau).

Visitors will see more than 150 exhibits that were not exported outside Germany and for the first time in Russia will be represented at the Kazan Kremlin. These exhibits reflect previously little known pages of the relationship of Christians and Muslims in Germany in the 15th-20th centuries. All contacts of the Germans with  the Muslim civilization were reflected in science, culture and everyday life. For 600 years, the Turks and Tatars belonged to the defining role in a history of acquaintance of the inhabitants of Germany with the Muslim East.

The exhibition presents the history of the Tatars sent to the Prussian army in cavalry regiments (since 1675) by Peter I and Catherine I. They were allowed to choose from their ranks the Imam of the Tatar and open a Muslim prayer room. So in 1732 the first Tatar Muslim community of Potsdam was laid.

For the first time it will be possible to see the diplomatic letters of the Crimean khans to the Prussian rulers recently found in the Prussian State Archives and the reciprocal messages from the Prussian court to the Crimea, showing a friendly character of relations between countries and the international recognition of the Tatar statehood. The exhibition also features portraits of Kazan Tatars (imam and rich city dweller) unknown earlier, made from nature by the German ethnologist and traveler V. Kizivetter, during his stay in Kazan in 1842.

The rarest exhibit is the "Tatar lamp" from the city hall of Gardelen. There is an inscription: "I was made in 1916 by a POW prisoner Tatar from Kazan Nasibullah." For many years, artfully carved from a tree, a lamp reflecting in its forms motifs of Tatar applied  art of the TransKazan, adorned the town hall of the German city of Gardelegen.

Among the unique exhibits of the exhibition are the first German editions of the Koran and its translations, manuscript diaries of travelers, "The History of the Ottoman Empire ..." by Dmitry Kantemir, rare lithographs and engravings, as well as the living voices of Tatar POWs of the First and Second World Wars.

The exposition will work until July 24, 2017.