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The Bug Cycle Path

It is one of the hottest days of the summer so far and I am lost somewhere on a road that is supposed to lead to a Tatar Cemetery. I checked the map before I left and was sure I just had to cycle straight and eventually turn right at the village I had just passed. An older lady walking by stops to see if my bike is okay. ‘Yes’, I say, ‘but I am lost’. She knows instantly that I am looking for the cemetery and directs me to continue straight. Within a few minutes the cemetery is easily spotted, with two signs outside the gate, one identifying it and the other giving a brief history and a map of other nearby sites of interest. The cemetery is on the ‘Bug Cycle Path’, an enterprise co-funded by the Lublin voivodeship, the European Union and the Regionalny Program Operacyjny⁷ that during the summer months is inundated with tourists who travel it to revel in the scenery and the history of the area. I walk through the gate and instantly I am aware that there is a stark contrast to the abandoned Jewish graveyard in Kościół. The paths through the graves have been cleared here, the headstones righted and in some cases put back together, the older ones cleaned of moss. In front of most of the graves are the candles so common in Polish graveyards; they are new, and one is still lit. This is a place of the dead where people still come to clean and care for them. As I make my way around the graveyard two noisy motorbikes pull up at the gate and two young couples dismount. They

7Regionalny Program Operacyjny is a program of region development implemented by the Polish government from 2007 to 2013 and 2014 to 2020. It is co-financed by the Polish government and European Regional Development Fund.

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wander around the graves for a while, trying to read the inscriptions, and then ask me to take a photograph of them in front of a headstone with a Muslim star and crescent motif. I ask politely why they are visiting. They were hoping to see the grave of legendary Tatar colonel Samuel Mirza Korycki, a contemporary of King Jan III said to be buried here. We talk a little about the Tatars. ‘They were the last Polish regiment to surrender in 1939’, one of the young men tells me. I am also told they were not really Muslim, that they attended Christian festivals and had the same saints as the local people. We say our goodbyes and they hop back on the spluttering motorbikes and

continue down the ‘Bug Cycle Trail’ to see the fortress outside Lebiedziew.

It is difficult to know how many Tatars still live in Poland. In a 2002 census only 448 people was shifted west at the end of World War II many Tatars found themselves in the USSR and fled

west across the new border into Poland. They tended to collect in larger cities rather than stay in the towns and villages of the borderlands. However, the region where I was based is still seen as the ‘Tatar’s little homeland’ (Łyszczarz 2011, 66). The Tatars have a romanticised identity, associated strongly by Poles and Polish Tatars with a heroic temperament. The Tatars are associated with the victory in the Battle of Grunwald (1410), which freed the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth from the influence of the Germans and resulted in the Tatars who fought being elevated to noblemen (Dziekan 2011). The post World War I ‘cultural movement’

involved the publishing of three separate journals on Tatar culture. The Nobel winning author Henryk Sienkiewicz, himself of noble Tatar heritage, filled his exceptionally popular historic

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epics with stories about them. Although the first Lipka Tatars are said to have had a shamanistic religion, those that settled what is now the north-east of Poland in the 14^th century were Muslim. In the next 600 years their faith took on some of the elements of the local Christians and they are known to have co-educated men and women. However, the Tatars of Poland were and are still Muslim, obeying the pillars of Islam and increasingly making links with Arab Muslim organisations (Łyszczarz 2011). Despite this religious difference Polish Tatars lost their distinct language many years ago and incorporate Christian celebrations into their calendars; some authors have gone so far as to say they are completely acculturated (Dziekan 2011). When people spoke to me of the Tatars it was not of them as a living community but as a historic category, part of the history of Poland and its nobility.

Image 3.18 ‘The lands of Lebiedziew conferred upon the Tatars 300 years ago by King Sobieskiego III’

In the Tatar cemetery we come across a place of the dead where those buried are no longer tied to the local population as genetic kin. Yet unlike the abandoned Jewish cemetery of Kościół, this graveyard is still cared for. The gravestones have not been repurposed; in fact, many were actively saved during the restoration. There are candles and flowers and official plaques celebrating a community whose members once owned this land. Here the work of creating social bonds with the dead continues in earnest. The graveyard could not in any way be considered abandoned and I think the term ‘historic’ suits it far better. It is part of a government funded and defined route that aims to highlight the scenic beauty and

heterogeneous culture of the Eastern Lubelski region. Indeed as you walk the path through the

well-maintained forest, past headstones with their multilingual epitaphs and Muslim symbols, the impression is exactly this. While there is silence locally regarding the Jewish population, I was encouraged to visit the graveyard in Zastawek. It is not just that the Tatar’s are visible though memorials in the landscape, but the people of the area speak for them too. The voice and activity conferred on the Tatar dead draw into sharp relief the silence and loss of the Jewish departed, and local refusals to interpret the scraps of their history still apparent.

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