Tatar tasbih prayer beads have long been used in the Muslim community. They were used to facilitate counting when performing dhikr, praising Allah, as well as during additional prayers for salah. The prayer beads in the museum’s collection were made of date pits in the 1920s. This material, among others, was typical for such items. The pits were strung crosswise on a thread, with round beads attached in the center between them.

Most of the pits are brown in color. The ends of the prayer beads are secured with glass beads of blue, green, blue and yellow colors. They were chosen not by chance. Siberian forests were symbolized by the green color, being the most revered and sacred sign of special distinction of all Muslim peoples. The white color symbolized purity, dark blue — airiness, connection with the Almighty, blue was a symbol of a peaceful sky, and yellow symbolized the twinkling of stars in the firmament.

These tasbih prayer beads from the Omsk region were made by hand. According to the All-Russian census data, in 2010 there were 41870 Tatars living in the region, of which 24284 were urban and 17586 were rural residents. This is the fifth largest ethnic group in the region after Russians, Kazakhs, Ukrainians and Germans.

The Tatars who live in the Omsk region along the Irtysh River are descendants of different ethnic groups: local Siberian Tatars, early migrants or Bukharans — natives of different regions of Central Asia, late migrants or Volga-Ural Tatars (descendants of the Volga Bulgars), who began to move to Siberia in small numbers as early as the 16th century, during the reign of Kuchum Khan in the Siberian Khanate. Mass resettlement of Tatars from European Russia was registered from the second half of the 19th century.

The Tatars of the Omsk region profess Sunni Islam. There is still a syncretism of Islamic and extra-Islamic elements. While the Volga Bulgars are known to have embraced Islam more than a thousand years ago, Islam in the Siberian Khanate is widely believed to have appeared as an official religion in the 1570s under Kuchum Khan.