Striding along the bridge that crosses the Kazanka River it is impossible to ignore the nose-to-tail rush-hour traffic streaming north out of the city. It is a sign of Tatarstan’s growing fortunes and rising prosperity. Traffic jams come with the territory, as do American-style fast food and glitzy urban development.
Away to the left lies Kazan’s latest bold construction project — a sports stadium, gleaming new business hotel and pyramidal entertainment complex, all so new that the dust has not yet settled and the construction workers not yet left the site.
In the days of Imperial Russia, those with power built churches with domes that stretched heavenwards; in the Soviet period, it was monumental statuary; these days, it is sports stadia and business hotels, the latest incarnation of missionstatement architecture. The fumes and incessant honking are distracting but it is still a beautiful day, with a lurid orange, late afternoon sun lowering over the mud of the river. Still only early September, it somehow feels later in the year, as if this is the last shout of summer before the onset of autumn.
Back across the water, as picture perfect as the film set for a multi-million rouble blockbuster, the impressive sweep of Kazan’s Kremlin dominates the view to the south.
It’s a relief to reach the far bank. Arriving at the end of the protective barrier, I descend a slope towards the river where two men stand fishing, completely oblivious of one another. Thus far, I have resisted the temptation to turn around — the bridge was no place to linger — but now it seems appropriate. Back across the water, as picture perfect as the film set for a multi-million rouble blockbuster, the impressive sweep of Kazan’s Kremlin dominates the view to the south.
Naturally, I had been aware of its presence whilst walking across the river — minarets and onion domes had loomed large over a high wall that had clearly contained something special. Now the Kazan Kremlin is visible in all its panoramic glory: a pristine cluster of neat Orthodox churches, a red-brick Tower of Babel, elegant pastel-hued residences and an improbably large mosque — a combined effect so extraordinary that it is little wonder that the complex entered the new millennium as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
As the setting sun turns the white limestone walls the colour of apricots, the fishermen pack up to leave empty-handed and a dredger slumps past low in the water. The rush-hour exodus has almost ended, although a ghost of red tail-light tracery is still weaving its way north to far-flung city suburbs. It’s time to return across the bridge to the city centre. Just a few lonely figures are heading the same way, their shadows throwing monstrous shapes on the Kremlin walls as they pass.
Welcome to Tatarstan
A day or two earlier, arriving in Kazan on the overnight train from Moscow, I had switched on my mobile phone to be greeted with the message, “W elcome to the Republic of Tatarstan”. It must be official then: the Republic of Tatarstan, with Kazan its capital, really is a place apart even if it is just one of 21 republics, that (along with countless oblasts, krais and okrugs) make up the Russian Federation (for more on these various republics see the short article The Russian Federation in this issue).
Looking around at the clean streets and gleaming new development, it is certainly not Chechnya either. Where Russia’s Caucasus republics have Islamic militants, third-world poverty and a tangible attitude problem towards Moscow rule, Tatarstan is a very compliant member of the Federation. The Tatars fight their corner, but they also maintain good relations with Moscow.
And Tatar goodwill towards Moscow is reciprocated. Mention Kazan in the Russian capital and it’s clear that Tatarstan hints of romance. Kazan has a reputation as the sort of place many Muscovites would not mind moving to. Most importantly, Tatarstan also has oil money. The fact that a good amount of this oil money is ploughed back into local development is to the republic’s great advantage, as is its pacific reputation — there are no Kalashnikov-toting rebels here. If we can overlook the fact that Tatarstan may not be quite so autonomous as its constitution claims, Tatarstan presents some interesting statistics. Nowhere in this world is there another republic so far north with so dominant a Muslim population. Kazan, 800 kilometres east of Moscow, is on the same latitude as Glasgow and parts of Alaska.
Elsewhere in Europe, we would need to look to Albania or the North Caucasus republics of the Russian Federation to find places where Islam is so woven into the fabric of everyday life. Kazan may lie further east than Mecca but this is still Europe after all — the Eurasian continental divide at the Urals remains a full day’s train ride away to the east.
Ivan the Terrible
Things were not always so peaceful in Kazan, which celebrated its 1000th anniversary in August 2005. Having been central to the Golden Horde and then capital of the independent Khanate of Kazan for over a century, the city was razed in 1552 by Ivan the Terrible, who slaughtered most of the population and forcibly converted many of the remainder, transforming Kazan from a Muslim city to an Orthodox Christian one. Ivan IV may not have been called ‘the Terrible’ for nothing but at least he had a good taste in architecture and Moscow’s St Basil’s Cathedral was built as a tribute to his Kazan victory. A few years later Ivan ordered the rebuilding of Kazan too: the walls of the Kremlin were restored and a new cathedral constructed utilising the talents of Postnik Yakovlev and Ivan Shirjay, the main architects involved in the construction of Moscow’s St Basil’s. Legend dictates that Tsar Ivan had Yakovlev blinded after constructing St Basil’s so that he might never build anything so beautiful again but this is pure myth: Ivan may well have been ‘terrible’ but he was also pragmatic — Yakovlev’s talents were such that they would be needed elsewhere.
Any city in the Russian Federation worth its salt has a pedestrian thoroughfare and Kazan is no exception. Ulitsa Baumana stretches almost all the way from the Kremlin to the neon-lit Hotel Tatarstan at Tukaya Square. Ulitsa Baumana exhibits the commercial face of the new Russian wealth that modernisers are so proud of: expensive shops, fashion boutiques and trendy cafés — a determinedly post-Soviet world of ATMs, wi-fi and Benetton.
Not everything has been renovated though: here and there stand once-grand art nouveau buildings with rusting balconies and crumbling caryatids. Nor is it really a faceless ‘Anytown’ as there are discrete nods to localism, with Turkish and Tatar restaurants and gift shops selling Tatar souvenirs. If Ulitsa Baumana were a brand it would probably be Tatar Lite.
Fruit stalls outside the 19th-century Soltanov Mosque in Kazan's lower town (photo © Laurence Mitchell).
The Bulak Canal, constructed during the Kazan khanate to connect the city’s Nizhny Kaban Lake with the Kazanka River, flows a couple of blocks south of the pedestrian zone. For all Kazan’s modern multiculturalism, the canal is still something of a frontier — a liquid fault line of ethnicity and fortune. South and west of the Bulak Canal lies Kazan’s lower town, its Tatar quarter. Those Tatars that Ivan IV did not kill were forced to live on this side of the canal and, although this has not been obligatory for more than a century, the pattern has stuck.
South of the Bulak Canal, the houses are certainly less grand, there seem to be street markets and mosques at every corner and it feels somehow Central Asian, as well it might. In this part of town it looks as if the pioneering Kazan Tourist Board has got it about right with their slogan ‘Kazan, where Europe meets Asia’ — echoing the title of Turnerelli’s classic mid nineteenth-century book on Kazan called Russia on the borders of Asia . Here you will find green mosques with pencil minarets, dark-eyed men and women in hejab, and tiny cafés, clinically white-tiled and brightly lit like those in Turkey, that display photos of Tatar favourites like samsa and shashlyk.
I wander through a large covered market, stalls piled high with dried apricots, a fruit that for some reason I always associate with the Islamic world. Reflecting how this side of town brings to mind Uzbekistan — the dress, the language, the atmosphere — I am approached by a young man who actually turns out to be an Uzbek.
Aziz wants to practice his English, which he speaks fast with a mellifluous Turkish accent. There seems no ulterior motive other than friendship and curiosity — spontaneous street encounters such as this tend to be rare in Russia, although commonplace in Central Asia. We talk football, and about Samarkand where he comes from, and after a pleasant ten-minute chat he melts away into the crowd. I had meant to ask him how he had identified me as a non-Russian European but sidetracked by our conversation I never quite got round to it. Russians often stop me for directions so I like to think that I blend in most of the time. Not here apparently.
The Kazan mosque
Next day I return to the more glamorous surroundings of the upper town to revisit the Kremlin. It is Sunday and stretch limos and ribbonbedecked wedding cars are parked up near the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate entrance. Just outside the gate the men of a boisterous wedding party are tossing a bridegroom high into the air to loud cheers. The groom grins stoically, seemingly resigned to his part in this pre-nuptial ritual. Within the Kremlin, more well-dressed wedding parties are on the prowl. Young men in stiff new suits point video cameras at newly-wed couples; elegantly coiffed bridesmaids in short skirts and high heels teeter along clutch ing bottles of (real French) champagne. There are occasional spurts of hurried movement when it looks as if a rival group is about to reach a chosen photo location first.
It may seem a little surreal but Kazan’s Kremlin is tailormade for photo-shoots of this kind; it is, after all, the sort of manicured historical landmark frequently favoured by upmarket magazines like Vogue for their fashion spreads. Surprisingly perhaps, of all the Kremlin locations, it is the courtyard of the Kul Sharif Mosque that is favoured above all else and wedding parties — Russian and Tatar, Orthodox and Muslim — take full advantage of the photogenic qualities of this, the largest mosque in Russia and second largest in Europe.
The Kul Sharif (or Qolsharif) Mosque is a recent phenomenon, inaugurated in 2005 as part of the city’s millennium celebrations and named after an imam who perished defending the city against Ivan IV’s army. It is an undeniably beautiful building — an inspired white and blue marble creation that even manages to upstage the Annunciation Cathedral and the leaning Syuyumbike Tower, the Kremlin’s other main attractions.
Outside the Kremlin entrance, close to where I had seen the groom-throwing wedding party e arlier, stands a powerful piece of sculpture depicting a man entrapped by barbed wire. The bronze is dedicated to the memory of the local Tatar poet Musa Jalil who died during World War II but it might equally represent repression and suffering in a broader abstract sense.
Certainly, Kazan has had its share of pain over the centuries, even if it has wilfully reinvented itself in modern times as a haven of peace and tolerance. In a few years time, Kazan, chosen as sports capital of Russia in 2009, will be much better known when it becomes an important host city for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Football fans from all over the world will throng its bars and have their photos taken outside the Kremlin. No doubt by then its underground metro system will also be complete.
For the time being, Kazan is little heard of outside Russia, although within the Federation the city is something of a showpiece as a well-behaved and cooperative portion of the Turkic world tucked away in the Volga region.
Of course, if the Kul Sharif Mosque manages to regularly fill its 17,000 capacity, serving a purpose other than the purely symbolic, then Moscow might just start to become a little nervous. Perhaps the real danger, though, is another one. Kazan could all too easily end up as the centrepiece of a Tatarstan theme park.
