İldar Kharissov Advocate for the Turkic Peoples of Europe: In memory of Swietłana Czerwonnaja
İldar Kharissov12 Advocate for the Turkic Peoples of Europe: In memory of Swietłana Czerwonnaja I knew the name of Swietłana Czerwonnaja long before we met personally. In the 1980s - I was a student at that time and lived in Tatarstan - the colorful volume "Fine Arts in Soviet Tatarstan" by S. Czerwonnaja could not be overlooked in bookshops. This book was also stored at home in my parents’ book collection. The title sounds officially, but one should keep in mind that the book was published in Moscow in 1983; Its publication alone showed the respect for Tatar artists in the capital of a vast country, the formerly USSR. Artists from many other “autonomous” republics of the Soviet Union could only dream of such a successful - to put it in today's language - PR campaign. Swietłana Czerwonnaja did this for the Tatar culture, which she loved and respected all her life. Our personal acquaintance came about in 1994 at the Institute for Turkology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Thanks to the friendly relationship with Professor Barbara Kellner-Heinkele - the head of the institute at the time - Swietłana Czerwonnaja carried out several projects in collaboration with the institute, which dealt with the history and culture of the Islamic - especially Turkic-speaking - peoples of Europe. The Institute for Turkology published, among other things, the monograph “The World of the Turkic Peoples between the Crimea and the North Caucasus” by Swietłana Czerwonnaja (Berlin, 2000). When we first met, Czerwonnaja suggested a joint project to me: an investigation of parallels between Quran recitations and Tatar šamail (Islamic calligraphic-iconic “graphics”, images without a picture). Unfortunately, this idea was never realized, but later we often met in joint projects that had to do with the Crimean and Volga Tatars and those inspired by or conducted at the Berlin Institute for Turkology, the SÜRGÜN project group, the Society for EASTERN EUROPE ADVANCEMENT or the Institute for Caucasica-, Tatarica- and Turkestan Studies (ICATAT). After Swietłana Czerwonnaja moved from Moscow to Toruń (Poland), she approached Germany and German-Islamic (art) history not only geographically, but also thematically. We met for the last time in the year of her 80th birthday in Magdeburg - at the conference "Muslims in Central Germany yesterday and today", which the ICATAT organized as part of the program „Fremde. Nähe. Heimat” (September 2016). As always, dear Swietłana was elegant, astute, resolute in her judgments and shone through erudition. She proudly presented the anthology "The Tatars of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in History, Language, and Culture", which was published in 2013 in Toruń. Her heart has beaten unmistakably for the concerns of the Turkic peoples of Europe, for researching their history and culture as well as their rights in the present and future. 12
Composer, Music-Turkologist, Head of the Music Department at Institute for Caucasica-, Tataricaand Turkestan-Studies (ICATAT), President of the Society for EASTERN-EUROPEADVANCEMENT e. V.
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