Exhibition presented by the Museum of King Jan III’s Palace at Wilanów from September 18,, 2023 to December 2024, titled “This is the Great Light and the Key of Paradise. Hymns from King Sobieski’s Tatar villages” was dedicated and devoted to the cultural heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars. The exhibition was installed in King Sobieski’s historic Banquet Hall, where the monarch received his guests and discussed state affairs. The illusionistic Baroque wall paintings which decorated the Hall since King Sobieski created a deliberate contrast to the Arabic sacred books of the king’s Tatar subjects. The audio background was original recordings of Old Turkic hymns (rooted even in Yunus Emre and Ahmed Yesevi tradition) and local Quran recitation recorded among the last living bearers of this six-hundred-year-old tradition in Poland-Lithuania.
The originator and curator of the exhibition was Andrzej Drozd. It was the first museum presentation of its kind devoted to the unique cultural phenomenon of the manuscript scriptures of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars and its connections with the historical Turkic culture and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the manuscripts of the Tatars from the Wilno (Vilnius), Nowogródek (Navahrudak) and Podlasie regions, beneath the guise of the Arabic alphabet, alongside Central Asian hymns, Old Polish apocrypha, Catholic church hymns, and biblical narratives can be found. This exhibition was made possible in particular thanks to cooperation with the Lithuanian National Museum in Vilnius, which provided valuable objects of oldTatar writing. Another extraordinary artifact, shown at the exhibition only for a limited time for conservation reasons, was a unique Tatar copy of the antitrinitarian Nieśwież Bible from 1572, preserved in the collections of the University of Warsaw Library (which is being prepared for submission to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register).
The exhibition featured, among other objects, a museum replica of a 17th-century minbar from the mosque in Rejże (Lith. Raižiai) village, Lithuania. This monument, dating back to the reign of King John III Sobieski (1686), is a unique testament to the artistic culture of the Tatars of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the only surviving object of its kind.
