Why “Tatars” and not “Bulgars”: the story of one name
The common logic is simple: if our ancestors are Bulgars, then we are a Bulgar people. But the names of peoples live by their own rules. Let's examine how a foreign word became our own and why the Bulgars lost this game.
The Russian chronicle recorded the catastrophe of 1236:
"Godless Tatars came from the eastern countries to the Bulgar land, and took the good city of Bulgar, and killed everyone from the old to the young and small children."
This phrase already conceals all the future confusion: the inhabitants are called Bulgars, the newcomers – Tatars. A few centuries later, the descendants of the devastated Bulgars will bear the name of those who sacked their city.
A myth that is half true
The logic of "Bulgar ancestors, therefore the Bulgar people" seems ironclad. And it's true, but only up to the word "therefore," which is where everything stumbles.
The Volga Bulgars truly stand at the origins of the Tatar people. In 922, their ruling elite adopted Islam, long before the Christianization of Rus', and it remains the cornerstone of the Tatar faith. historical memory. The city of Bolgar was a major trading center at the junction of the Volga and Kama rivers. There's no arguing with that.
But the word "means" is more complicated. A people isn't passed down in a direct line, like a family name. It's a composite of various elements. Over time, the Bulgar core was joined by a powerful Finno-Ugric stratum, Kipchak steppe dwellers, and, to a lesser extent, Mongols. Considering the Volga Tatars to be solely descended from the Bulgars is like considering Russians to be solely descended from the Polyans, forgetting the Vyatichi, Varangians, and the Finnic tribes of Zalesye.
The Bulgars themselves are also not a “pure” people
To be honest, the Bulgars weren't an ethnic monolith either. They belonged to the Oghur branch of the Turks: a distinct, early-diverging group of Turkic languages, significantly different in phonetics from the main, "common Turkic" group. The only surviving language of this branch today is Chuvash. (A paradox we'll return to: the closest linguistic relative of the ancient Bulgars is not Tatar, but Chuvash.) The Bulgars emerged somewhere in the steppes between today's Kazakhstan and the North Caucasus, incorporating groups of very diverse nomads.
They then spread across Eurasia. One branch migrated to the Danube, merged with the Slavs, and gave rise to the First Bulgarian Empire. The other settled on the Middle Volga. And this Volga state existed as a crossroads from the very beginning.
This is clearly evident in the bones. A paleogenetic study of remains from the city of Bolgar, burials dating back to the early 14th century (work conducted in the 2010s), revealed a mixed picture. Some of the buried individuals are genetically close to the Finno-Ugric groups of the region and today's Kazan Tatars. Others display a Transcaucasian profile, Armenian or Anatolian, consistent with archaeology: the city was inhabited by merchant settlers. Thus, Bolgar was a trading hub where people and languages mingled, and the "purity" of Bolgar is already an illusion at this stage.
Where did the word "Tatar" come from?
But then things get strange. The word "Tatar" originated far from the Volga and initially had no connection whatsoever with the Bulgars. Moreover, it wasn't even a Turkic self-designation.
The ancient Turkic Orkhon inscriptions of the 8th century mention "otuz tatar" (thirty Tatars) and "tokuz tatar" (nine Tatars) – tribal associations in the territory of today's Mongolia. Chinese chronicles simultaneously write about "da-ta" – the same root. These are Mongolian-speaking nomads or those closely related to the Mongols. In the Turkic community, the root tat Often meant "outsiders," people of a different language (the etymology here, however, is controversial, with several versions). Roughly speaking, "Tatar" initially meant "not us."
The story then becomes almost mocking. The Tatars were one of the major tribes of the Mongolian plateau and longtime enemies of the clan from which Genghis Khan emerged, and he defeated them. But the name outlived its bearers. As the Mongol army rolled westward, neighbors began calling all the conquerors Tatars. The Franciscan monk Plano Carpini, who reached the khan's headquarters in the 1240s, titled his work unequivocally: "History of the Mongols, Whom We Call Tatars" (Historia Mongalorum, quos nos Tartaros appellamus). In Europe, the form Tartar In addition, due to the consonance, they associated it with the hellish Tartarus, and the image of “people from the underworld” stuck forever.
How the name reached the Volga
In 1236, the armies of Batu Khan and Subutai captured Bolgar. Bulgaria became part of the Golden Horde – the Ulus of Jochi, which stretched from Siberia to the Black Sea region. (Chronicles describe a wholesale massacre, but historians disagree: a significant portion of the population appears to have survived and integrated into the new system.)
The Horde was oddly structured. The ruling elite was Mongol, while the vast majority of the population were Kipchak Turks. The few conquerors quickly merged into this Kipchak mass. In the 14th century, the Arab official Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari reported that the "true Tatars," that is, the Mongols, interbred with the Kipchaks so much that after a couple of generations they were indistinguishable. The Mongolian language gave way to Kipchak dialects, and the elites converted to Islam under the Khans Berke and Uzbek.
But the name remained. For Russians and Europeans, all subjects of the Horde were Tatars, both the steppe nomads and the sedentary descendants of the Bulgars. Local self-designations faded into the background. Inwardly, a person might consider themselves a Muslim, a Bulgar, a resident of Kazan, but outwardly, they were Tatars, and this external name resonated louder than all the internal ones.
Who finally hammered this name in?
The Horde disintegrated into khanates—Kazan, Crimea, Astrakhan, and Siberia. But the name "Tatars" had already become an umbrella term, encompassing almost all Muslim Turks in the former Horde territory.
Moscow then took over. For a state that had built its legitimacy on its victory over the "Tatar yoke," the image of the Tatar was a key symbol. Having captured Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556, Moscow also inherited the habit of calling local Muslims "Tatars." The Russian Empire systematized this: in censuses and documents, "Tatars" were used to describe Muslim Turks from the Volga region to Siberia, as well as Transcaucasian Muslims, who were also called "Tatars" (hence the old "Caucasian Tatars"); their name was changed in Soviet times, beginning in the 1930s, to "Azerbaijanis." (The terminology, incidentally, was fluid: the same people could be listed as "Tatars" and "Mohammedans" in different documents.)
There was also an internal reason, not just imperial pressure. By the early 20th century, "Tatar" had proven a convenient umbrella. It encompassed Kazan, Crimean, Siberian, and Astrakhan Muslims, all different in history but recognizably related. "Bulgar," however, only encompassed the Middle Volga region, remaining a label for a single group and a single genealogy. The Jadid reformers who were building the modern nation needed a broader term, and "Tatar" provided it. In 1920, the name acquired a seal and borders: the Tatar ASSR was born.
Bulgarism: A Revenge That Came Too Late
And yet, there was an attempt to reclaim the name. In the second half of the 19th century, an ideology called Bulgarism emerged. Its proponents argued that the Volga Tatars were the direct descendants of the Bulgars, and that the Golden Horde was merely an alien accretion. Therefore, the proud name "Bulgar" had to be restored and the label "Tatar" cast off, along with the entire legacy of the "yoke" and raids.
The motive is clear. In Russian historiography, the Tatar was a figure of conqueror and destroyer, while the Bulgar was a peaceful merchant and representative of the early Islamic civilization. Changing one's name meant changing one's reputation. Even in our time, the historian Gali Yenikeyev criticized the rejection of the Tatar name and the negative portrayal of the ancient Tatars, seeing in it a trace of Eurocentric tradition. The Finnish researcher Antero Leitzinger observed the opposite: Bulgarists clung to the ancient Bulgars precisely because they were uneasy about the imposed negative image.
During Soviet times, the Bulgar version was even pushed from above: the peaceful Bulgars were ideologically more respectable than the "feudal conquerors" of the Horde. But the authorities didn't rename the people. And when the debate flared up again in the twilight of the USSR, the main thing became clear: people already considered themselves Tatars. By then, the Bulgars had become an ancestor they were proud of, but no longer called by their name. Revenge was several centuries too late.
What's left in the end?
The compromise is most clearly visible in the language. Tatar belongs to the Kipchak branch of the Turkic languages, a legacy of the Horde. But it retains a Bulgar substratum: individual words with characteristic Oghur phonetics. The language is literally stitched together from two main layers, Kipchak and Bulgar, and the seam is visible. (That same Chuvash paradox, by the way: it's not Tatar, but Chuvash, that maintains the direct Oghur lineage.)
Genetics present the same duality. On the maternal side, Volga Tatars are dominated by West Eurasian mitochondrial lineages, approximately 84 percent, with a significant Finno-Ugric contribution and a small East Asian share of 12–16 percent. Neither Bulgar nor Mongolian "purity" is discernible in these figures.
Hence the answer to the original question. The Bulgars stand at the source, but they are not the only ancestor and far from the most numerous. The name, however, was attached to the most powerful state: under its name, the people were remembered by their neighbors and incorporated into empires. And also because this word unified more broadly than any local name. The Bulgars have not disappeared: they are in the language, in memory, in the date 922. And at the top, in all documents and censuses, the name of these former outsiders settled—and over eight centuries, it became completely their own.
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