Miejsca (domeny) pamięci w teorii pamięci kulturowej a badania nad Tatarami

ENEver since the Second World War, Polish Muslim Tatars have been affected by passive forgetting, scattered across the country as they were, and focused on settling down in a new place, under the new conditions of a communist state, having lost the material touchstones of memory in the wake of the War and the subsequent migration from the countryside to urban areas. Nowadays in spite of their modest number, the ethnic and religious minority of Polish Tatars leads a rich cultural and religious life thanks to very active religious and cultural organizations. It seems that their efforts in the field of cultural memory, very much part of the memory industry and considerably intensified in the last two decades, are a vigorous response to a general ‘fear of forgetting’. The Tatars’ activities express a conscious need to protect Muslim Tatar identity through the use of different sites of memory, institutions, media, commemorative ceremonies and ritual performances. This text, basing on the theory of cultural studies, considers how the Polish Tatar Muslim minority has gone about shaping its modern identity and cultural memory.