Is Kazan Being Destroyed?

We walked along the side street, past buildings with peeling paint and fences covered in old concert and circus fliers. Zufar said the community had been the styx even in the 1880’s, but most people had been moved when the railroad station was built.


On this day we were following our guide Zufar around as he surveyed historic properties. We began our day at the Kazan Kremlin, attacked in 1552 and incorporated into Russia by Ivan IV the Terrible. Ivan’s soldiers, many of whom were Tatars from farther east, were allowed to settle outside of the Kremlin in an area surrounded by a wooden gate. The original Tatars were pushed out.

Following the road from the Kremlin to the railroad station, we passed the dilapidated apartments, including one which had belonged to Karl Fuchs, a famous German doctor. He’d settled in Kazan and wrote about the ethnography of the Tatars and their drinking problem. In addition, he was the first doctor Muslim women were allowed to see.

Next we came to a church, called Tixvin, built in the 18th century for Tatar Christians. After Russians gained control of Kazan, the surviving Muslim Tatars were forced to convert to Christianity. If they refused, a special committee was in charge of seeing that they were drowned in a pool of cold baptismal water outside the church. Many people escaped to Bashkortostan, a nearby province. Even today, there are more Tatars than Bashkirs in Bashkortostan. The Tixvin Church still operates. The blue building with gold onion domes used to be wood, but now it’s stone.

Not until Catherine the Great allowed greater personal freedom did mosques get built again in Tatarstan. By that time, however, Tatars had already become more mobile in society.

We looked at several different mosques. One looked cartoon-like with a tall thin green minaret. This one was built in Asian style primarily for Central Asians and Azeris. The sermons are in Tatar.

Another, also green and white, was the Marjani Mosue. It was the first mosque established after Catherine the Great granted religious freedom. In reverse of typical layouts, men sit on a higher floor than women. Mainly the rich and famous of Tatarstan go there.

We saw the remains of the Marjani neighborhood, which is slowly being torn down. In 2001 Zufar did research on the area and examined the foundations of buildings. At the time, plans were to restore the quaint little wooden houses and nearby buildings into a nursing home, children’s home, and special Muslim women’s health clinic. Instead, the land was sold to developers, so only a few buildings remained.


One house down the road from Marjani looked like it belonged to a band of hippies – it was painted in several bright colors. A brick wall separated the house from its neighbor’s, not because they wanted to hide the eyesore, but prevent their house from going up in flames if the neighbor’s did. Several times, sections of Kazan burned down when fired ravaged the wooden structures.

The firewalls, for the most part, had come down, and as a result several houses were scorched on the streets around Marjani. We saw neighborhoods that used to be more centralized, for example having a church or mosque per quadrant. Most religious places had been destroyed over the years.

One mosque, the Kazaklov, was built with funds of a man who lived in the Kazaklovsky House. A new-looking plaque dated the house to the 18050’s. Recently, efforts to preserve it had fallen on the wayside due to a lack of funds, so “arsonists” hired by developers burned it and the neighboring buildings down. They were basically waiting to be pulled down, since nobody wanted to be blamed for destroying the buildings, so I’d heard.

One ornate gray house had belonged to a Chechen who had fought in the Chechen war for independence in the 1930’s (sound familiar?). Somehow he was able to move to Kazan and even avoid jail, collecting a pension as a retired freedom fighter. I guess. He just had to abandon the cause. His daughter married a local and stayed in the house. At least that’s what I thought he said, as I could barely hang on to his Russian, and across the street a mufflerless bus puffed out black smoke and made a godawful racket.

We continued down the street and saw cracks in the foundations of several buildings. Zufar blamed it on the settling of the earth due to subway construction. The metro had only five stops, and the government planned to increase it. The problem was that every time they dug, something historic was found and they stopped. A meeting that night was to address whether or not the construction should continue. Stopping construction is impossible. In the neighborhood of cracking foundations, only one old wooden house remained.

Taking a shortcut, we walked through a park decorated with a Little Lenin statue. I love Little Boy Lenin! The statue was in a defiant pose, the boy gesturing wildly to no one. I took pictures and then we left, passing two young men sitting in the makeshift theater, drinking vodka in preparation for the holiday weekend.

Next we saw a car backed into a deep ditch. If I’d had popcorn, I would have walked by the scene, put a handful in my mouth, and asked what was going on. The driver was helplessly looking at her car and dialing friends while people tried to figure out how to get the car out. Across the street was the Burnaevsky Mosque, known as the town’s radical mosque. Sermons are given in Russian and the attendees are mainly foreigners and Chechens, since they don’t know Tatar. We read some of the news stories posted outside about how Russia was oppressing them. A Kazan friend’s friend’s brother went there, and he has since run away to Pakistan.

We moved the opposite way of the chemical factory and headed to the riverfront, near the Jewish school. The riverfront was pretty, the water still and reflecting the buildings and lights of downtown Kazan. A man fished with a long pole, some guys drank beer out of plastic cups, and a couple of kids lit fireworks, probably ruining the guy’s fishing. Across the river was Kazan’s glorious new project – a 30 story skyscraper. We asked about the minaret nearby, and Zufar said it was built starting in 1912, to celebrate 1000 years of Islam in Bulgari. (How do they come up with these numbers?) The Russian Revolution got in the way, and when the Kul Setova mosque was finished in 1922, it was only open for half a year before being turned into a kindergarten. Most mosques and churches were reassigned as schools, factories, or storage centers during communism. Only 24 Kazan mosques were operating at the end of the Soviet era, and that number has significantly increased since.

A week later we saw more places in Kazan.

The Chuvash Church, near the Kazan Kremlin, was a jail in the 1930’s. Zufar’s grandfather and great grandfather were jailed there as political prisoners. His grandfather was used as cannon fodder in the Finno-Russo War (1940), and he made it back. His great-grandfather was exiled to Archangelesk, where he died in the camps. His great uncle was sent to the siege on Leningrad, and is officially missing. At one point, everyone in the jail was executed in the little red building area of the churchyard.

The street near the Chuvash church, along the river, used to be the site of pretty gardens and nice houses. Zufar showed us the pages about the street in the register of historic monuments he was updating. All that was left of the street was a church built in the 1830’s. “For the boojwa to cleanse their sins,” he said sarcastically. All over new huge houses were being built for the nouveau riche.One place nearby belonged to the owner of the basketball team/ government member, another to the speaker of the Duma.

Near the speaker’s house was another charred house. The woodwork was unique, with three long and narrow front windows. It reminded me of a movie star house in Montana, so large. The Union of Artists had been housed there, and two years ago someone had tried to burn it down. We asked what was to be done, and he said it was slated to be restored. But really, what would happen to it? Would the richies want it around? Would they hire someone to burn it down again? Or could it become a cool café or someone’s home? No one likes an empty building full of squatters, after all.