The Tradition of Baptized Tatar's Orthodox Singing in the Laishevsky and Mamadysh Districts of the Kazan Province: A Historical Background

Gumerova Aysylu Tagirovna PhD in Art History Associate Professor at the Department of Theory of Music and Composition of The N.G. Zhiganov Kazan State Conservatory  420015, Russia, respublika Tatarstan, g. Kazan', ul. Bol'shaya Krasnaya, 38 gumerovaat@mail.ru Other publications by this author

The second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries are an important milestone in the Kryashen Tatar's history, noted by researchers as a period of their formation of ethnocultural self-consciousness. One of the factors determining this process was the new ideology of the Christian Church and educational activities of the Russian Orthodox Church, deployed among the non-Russian peoples in most regions of the Russian Empire, including the Middle Volga Region ^[3]. Thanks to active missionary work, based primarily on introducing a new religious and school education system, the influence of orthodoxy among the baptized Tatars increased. They gradually recognized this religious teaching as the basis of their ethnocultural identity.

Introducing baptized Tatars to Christianity was carried out during this period in parallel with several other directions. The main ones were the organization of missionary schools, the opening of foreign parishes, and the preparation of translated religious literature. A special place in missionary activities was given to liturgical singing: hymns sounding in their native language had a great emotional impact on the baptized and helped to attract them to worship in churches. Church singing in the Tatar language became an effective tool for the maximum "soft" embedding of Christianity in the Tatar population's worldview. As a result, a unique orthodox singing tradition emerged, which is currently an important component of the Kryashen Tatars' musical culture.

In this article, the subject of attention is the history of the formation of the baptized Tatar's orthodox singing tradition who lived in the Laishevsky and Mamadysh districts in the Kazan Province. In particular, a number of settlements that are currently part of the Tyulyachinsky District in the Republic of Tatarstan were considered. The interest in this geographical area is because, at present, the local Kryashen Tatars are distinguished by a high level of religious culture and good preservation of the orthodox singing tradition in the Tatar language (which is not typical for all territorial subgroups of the Kryashen Tatars). In this regard, there is a reasonable interest in the region's history and the origins of the formation of singing practice.

According to pre-revolutionary sources, there were eight Kryashen villages in the territory of interest in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Here is a list of them (variants of the names of settlements found in various publications are given in parentheses):

1. Mamadyshsky District ^{[2, 7]}:

- Shemorbashskaya volost: d. Repair of Durteli (Durteli-Subash), D. Tyamti (Repairs from the wasteland of Bakhty, The Enemy);

- Elyshevskaya parish: Bolshye Savrush village (Oly Saurysh, Kryashen Saurush).

2. Laishevsky District ^[6]:

- Klyuchishchenskaya parish: d. Stary Karabayan (Korobyak Pochinok, Kolbagushevo), Bolshye Meretyaki village, Malye Meretyaki village (Meretyakovsky Pochinok);

- Kazylskaya volost: d. Upper Meretyaki;

- Karabayan parish: S. Karabayan.

The proximity of the baptized Tatars in this area with the Muslim Tatars contributed to the missionaries' close attention to the Christianized population. In 1860–1880, special schools for baptized Tatars were opened in each Kryashen village in the region, as well as so-called fraternal schools (their work was supervised by the Brotherhood of St. Gurius, an Orthodox missionary organization opened in Kazan in 1867).

The following table contains information about the opening dates of the schools in the Tatar-Kryashen villages in the Laishevsky and Mamadyshsky counties ^{[1, 2, 4]}:

The presence of schools is an extremely important aspect of the history of the baptized Tatars' orthodox singing. They were taught according to a special educational system developed by Nikolay Ilminsky (1822–1891). Its peculiarity was that, firstly, all the lessons were conducted in the baptized Tatars' native language. Secondly, a special place in the program was given to church singing. Through intoning prayers in their native language and not through memorizing dogmatic texts, children were introduced to the most important Christian truths. According to the curriculum, singing was second only to the law of God and the Russian language in terms of the number of hours spent per week. As a result, these schools were educational institutions and became a kind of center for the local residents' orthodox musical education. Hearing their children's singing, parents were delighted and touched and often sent them to school precisely because they were taught to sing there. And the students, singing orthodox hymns, joined the new religious picture of the world and indirectly involved the older generation in this process.

The teachers in the schools were baptized Tatars – pupils of the Kazan Central Baptismal Tatar School, the Kazan Teachers' Seminary – who were trained according to the same system. They not only engaged with the students but also conducted active missionary work with the population: "in affirming the faith of the baptized Tatars, teachers of fraternal Baptismal Tatar schools acted, who, in addition to teaching children, try to acquaint adults with Christian truths and expose them to the content of these holy truths" ^{[4, p. 19]}. Music also played a special role in this activity: conversations and sermons were always accompanied by the pupils singing the school prayers in the Tatar language. There is a lot of evidence about the effectiveness of the teachers' activities in pre-revolutionary sources. For example, I. A. Iznoskov writes about the Tyamti village school in the Mamadyshsky District: "In this school, as well as in other fraternal schools, the teacher often gathers people to school on the eve of holidays and here, after reading and singing some prayers, psalms, and festive hymns by all students, he tells the people the history of the holiday and reads edifying books and teachings in the Tatar language" ^{[1, p.21]}.

Of particular interest from the point of view of the history of the non-Russian peoples of the Middle Volga Region's religious education are the works of S. V. Chicherina (1867–1918), a teacher, publicist, and ethnographer ^{[5, 9, 10]}. In 1904, she made a trip to the "foreign" villages of the Kazan Province, including visiting the Kryashen settlements in the geographical zone of interest to us. A visit to the Baptismal Tatar School in the Stary Karabayan village made a great impression on her. Especially picturesquely, she describes the episodes dedicated to the church singing of students:

I will never forget this picture: in the depths of a modest village hut, covered partly with straw, partly with bark; there is a gallery crowded along the hut with a crowd of foreigners, mostly women, in colorful homespun canvas shirts and dresses, with shiny monists on the forehead, temples, and chest, with fancy embroidered towels on their heads. The choir gathered in a semicircle in the middle of the courtyard. […] In the quiet air, harmonious, loud, animated singing sounds are carried; it spreads around in melodic waves and attracts new listeners. Slavic prayers alternate with Baptismal-Tatar ones, the latter come out especially well. The singers, who understand every spoken word, give these prayers a sincere, convinced expression ^{[10, p. 213]}.

At the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, several Kryashen parishes began to function in the territory under consideration. In 1897, the Church of the Life-Giving Trinity was built in the village of Bolshye Meretyaki ^{[8, p. 214]}, in 1899, the Kazan-Bogoroditskaya Church was opened in the village of Karabayan ^{[8, p.214]}, and in 1904, the Kozmodemyanskaya Church in the village of Bolshye Savrushi ^{[2, p. 262]}. These parishes covered residents of all the Kryashen villages in the district. In some localities where there was no temple (for example, in the village of Subash), there was a school church where services were also conducted in the native language. Thus, residents of all villages could attend divine services and hear church hymns with Tatar texts. The services' musical arrangements were provided by the students of the local Tatar-Epiphany schools. They mastered the entire corpus of liturgical hymns in the course of their training. Their participation in divine services was a mandatory part of the curriculum: by performing prayers in the conditions of the temple ritual, the schools' pupils were more deeply immersed in the semantic content of the prayers, realized their involvement in the sacred action, and became closer to the Church. In addition, it served as an additional practice that contributed to the development of their musical ear in the skill of four-voice choral singing. Meanwhile, the liturgical melodies were gradually preserved in the singers' and parishioners' memory, which contributed to the increasing spread of the singing tradition.

In general, it can be argued that in the pre-revolutionary period, as a result of well-thought-out services focused on specific ethnocultural conditions, the missionaries created the most favorable conditions for introducing the baptized Tatars of the region in question to the practice of orthodox singing. This became possible, first of all, due to the active use of music as a unique tool of Christian enlightenment. The effectiveness of these measures is clear when referring to the current state of the singing tradition. Despite the difficult historical and cultural conditions (less than 20 years later, the Soviet period of our country's history began, and the young singing practice was threatened with extinction), the Kryashen's orthodox singing tradition in the villages under consideration is alive and continues to exist to this day. This was shown by the results of an ethnographic expedition to the Kryashen settlements in the Republic of Tatarstan's Tyulyachinsky District, organized by the Kazan State Conservatory in 2018. Local Kryashen Tatars still remember the pre-revolutionary schools, in which, according to them, "they were taught to sing spiritual chants." In every village, grandmothers – "experts" of Orthodox singing – have adopted this tradition from an older generation. In their performance, there is a fairly large corpus of hymns recorded here, sounding both in the conditions of church worship and domestic life. It should be emphasized that the Kryashens of the region are very sensitive to orthodox singing; they understand the depth and importance of Christian truths embedded in the content of the prayers.

Thus, the musical tradition introduced "from outside" has now become an important part of Kryashen culture, representing their confessional affiliation and being an ethnic sign that distinguishes them in the multicultural space of the Volga-Ural region.

Considering the history of the formation of the baptized Tatars' orthodox singing in the Laishevsky and Mamadyshsky counties undertaken in this work does not exhaust all possible aspects of its study. A more detailed study of the current state of singing practice, analysis of the chants' musical and stylistic characteristics, the definition of forms, and the ethnographic context of their existence in the folk performing environment remain relevant. The belonging of the bearers of the tradition, mainly of the older generation, increases the importance of fixing and studying this peculiar layer of folk singing culture, which has its own history and represents an original musical and stylistic phenomenon.