THE SHIRINSKY FAMILY CHRONICLES THROUGHOUT THE CENTURIES
Marat Abyasovich Safarov,
Institute of Economics and Management in Industry,
8 Pyatnadtsataya Parkovaya Str., Moscow, 105203, Russia,
safarov84@mail.ru.
The history of the ancient Tatar dynasty of the Shirinskys dates back to 1298 and reflects different political events in the Horde and post-Horde periods. While holding the key positions in the Tatar khanates authority system, the Shirinskys in many ways kept the unity and connections between the vestiges of the Golden Horde. The Shirinskys viewed the territory of Meshchersky Yurt as a special sacred territory because it was there where the dynast, Bakhmet Shirinsky, first came from the Black Sea region. After the abolition of the Qasim Khanate the Shirinskys managed to keep some of their historical settlements in Meshchersky area while the Kadom and Kasimov branches of the dynasty got actively involved in merchantry. The paper presents a retrospective analysis of the political role of the ramified structure of the Shirinsky dynasty in different Tatar khanates. The author mainly focuses on the Kadom branch of the family that, even after the abolition of the Qasim Khanate, remained in their ancestral lands. In late 19th – early 20th century, due to successful entrepreneurial and charity work, many Kadom Shirinskys managed to restore their high status in the Tatar communities. As a case study, the paper studies the persona of Khusain Shirinsky, a fur merchant, who created a sort of a noble estate in his family settlement Bogdanovo near Kadom. The case is exemplified by the memories of Muslim students about the daily life in Bogdanovo and the local Jadid maktab, published in the ‘Vakyt’ newspaper in 1914.
Key words: the Shirinskys, genealogy, source studies, shajara, post-Horde states, murza, merchantry, Meshchera, Kasimov, Kadom.
