Svetlana Mikhailovna Chervonnaya,
Nicolaus Copernicus University (Torun, Poland),
ul. Bojarskiego 1,Toruń, 87-100, Polska,
swetlana@umk.pl.
Wooden mosques are the main part of an artistic heritage and an important cluster of contemporary sacral buildings of the Lithuanian Tatars, the ethnic and religious minority living in the lands of modern Lithuania, Poland and Belarus. They have been attracting the attention of researchers foralongtime,takinga prominent place in the literature dedicatedto the Lithuanian Tatars andinthe descriptions and catalogues of the monuments of their culture. However, the facilities of stone mosques in the Eastern European region havebeen poorly studied. In contrast to mass rural construction, there were certain, sporadic episodes concentrated in the large cities where Muslim communities originated (Minsk, Kaunas, Gdansk and projects of stone mosques for Vilnius and Warsaw). If wooden mosques are the product of folk art (folk architecture and decorative art), the design of stone mosques is the matter of professional architects, coming both from the Lithuanian Tatar environment (S. Krinitsky) and from creative intelligentsia circles (mainly Polish), who are actively involved in solving new problems of the development of modern Islamic religious architecture in the lands where Islam has never been the dominant religion, in European cities and metropolitan areas, which are multinational and multi-confessional in their population. This sacral architecture, whose history began in the 19th century, does not have such old historical traditions as rural wooden religious architecture of the Lithuanian Tatars, and it faces a whole complex of problems related to the assimilation and development of new building technologies, the placement of objects in the urban environment and the formation of the models on the basis of a certain stylistic concept (stylizing or innovative), which confront the architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Suchcreationsas the mosqueerectedin 1930 inKaunasorthemosqueinGdanskcompletedbythebeginningofthe 1990sindicatefavorableprospectsforthedevelopmentof the MuslimstonearchitectureintheEastEuropeanculturallandscape.
Key words:Islam in Europe, the culture of the Lithuanian Tatars, contemporary Muslim architecture, stone mosques in Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia.