The first Tatar settlers tried to preserve their Turco-Mongol shamanistic religion and sought asylum amongst the pre-Christian Lithuanians.

[8] Towards the end of the 14th century, another wave of Tatars—this time, Islamized Turks, were invited into the Grand Duchy by Vytautas the Great.

From the Battle of Grunwald onwards, the Lipka Tatar light cavalry regiments participated in every significant military campaign of Lithuania and Poland.

They initially served as a noble military caste but later they became urban-dwellers known for their crafts, horses, and gardening skills.

[9][10] There are still small groups of Lipka Tatars living in Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland, as well as their communities in the United States.

There was a subsequent wave of Tatar immigrants from Soviet Russia after the October Revolution of 1917, although these consisted mostly of political and national activists.

The majority of descendants of Tatar families in Poland can trace their descent from the nobles of the early Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Lipka Tatars had settlements in north-east Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, south-east Latvia and Ukraine.

[citation needed] A number of the Polish Tatars emigrated to the US at the beginning of the 20th century and settled mostly in the north eastern states, although there is also an enclave in Florida.

A significant number of the Tatars in the territories annexed by the USSR repatriated to Poland and clustered in cities such as Gdańsk (Maciej Musa Konopacki – patriarch of the Polish Orient[17]), Białystok, Warsaw and Gorzów Wielkopolski totaling some 3,000 people.

[citation needed] In 1925 the Muslim Religion Association (Polish: Muzułmański Związek Religijny) was formed in Białystok, Poland.

Taken together, both PC and ADMIXTURE analyses suggest the presence of a significant amount of east Eurasian-specific alleles among the autosomal genomes of Lipka Tatars.