When I got out to “roam around” Kazan at 7pm, the city looked like it had been lit by a thousand incandescent bulbs, each of their light bubbles licking up the borders of the next to form one giant bubble that swallowed up the city. It was June 20, the evening before the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. So, the sun was still shining.
I picked up a map from the hotel reception and was poring over it. The receptionist told me that the Kazan Kremlin was not to be missed. I smiled at the fact that in Kazan, like in other parts of the world, places that were once centers of power, were now centers of attraction. What people once feared, now they took selfies with.
The Kazan Kremlin, like other Kremlins scattered around Russia, was a fortress. Most old cities of Russia had a Kremlin. Sometime in the 18th and 19thcenturies, most Kremlins were torn down, perhaps with the realization that war wasn’t going to happen, or that if war came, the Kremlin offered no significant protection. Only a dozen or so survive. This made the Kazan Kremlin even more of a rarity than it would have otherwise been. I decided to head there first.
Squinting my eyes as I got out (the sun was still shining), I walked down the road that Saturday evening. The road quickly began to rise up. The two dimensional map had not been able to explain this projection. But then, I have always liked walking uphill. It made me feel alive.
Even if the heart was merely pumping the same blood, a little more frantically, I felt as though new blood was flowing through my legs. As I turned a curve on the road, the Kremlin became visible to me. At first sight, it couldn’t have been more different from the Moscow Kremlin. It was white and the walls were definitely not as high. The insides too were very different. But I did not know that then.As I walked up towards the Kremlin, I realised that it sat on top of a small hill that looked like an upturned copper cauldron (one of the stories behind the name Kazan). The hill would have provided a good vantage point for the rulers to look upon the city.
The most striking thing when you reach the Kremlin is the monument to Musa Chalil, a poet and resistance fighter of the Soviet Union. Musa stands with his arms pulled back by strong barbed chains that have also bound his legs. But the upturned face and the look of defiance that the sculptor managed to capture on stone, gives you the feeling that any minute now, with a tug of his powerful shoulders, Musa would break the chains and taste the freedom he craves for. I’m almost reminded of Sivaji Ganesan from Manohara
waiting to rip his chains apart.
After a picture, I move into the Kremlin itself through the Spasskaya Tower. After a walk around the abandoned monastery and the history museum, I come face to face with the newest building inside the Kremlin, the Qol Sharif Mosque.
The mosque is named after the Imam who served there and died defending Kazan from the Russian forces in 1552. The mosque was destroyed during the invasion, but it is speculated that its design elements may have inspired the Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. The new mosque was inaugurated in 2005 and can hold 6000 worshippers. With the mouths of its tent like blue dome, the mosque would look like a blue lotus blooming on the Kazanka River if seen from a distance. I stepped back a few steps to cover the magnificence of the mosque within the frame. Another few steps and my back would have hit the Sooyumbike Tower. Which would have been quite unfortunate because the tower is already leaning.
The Sooyumbike Tower is the Russian answer to the Leaning Tower of Pisa (although the former has been stabilised and no longer leans). There is no clarity on the exact date of its construction, although there is a popular legend that Ivan the Terrible built it within a week. The legend says that Ivan was smitten by the beauty of the Tatar queen Sooyumbike and built the tower as she demanded. But once it was finished, the queen jumped from it killing herself. The legend is untrue but makes for an interesting story. Consensus now leans (no pun intended) towards the Tower being a pre-Russian construction, by the Khans as similar structures were built in Central Asia by other Khans.
Next to the tower stands a grand arch that must have been the entrance to the palace of the Khans. The arch now looks down on a glass covered enclosure below the ground. These are the graves of the Khan rulers of Kazan (the last of whom was Sooyumbike). An attempt to click the graves resulted in my reflection on the glass getting on the camera, mildly scaring me.
Going further, the Kremlin ends with a curve to the right. At the curve is the Tainitskaya or Secret Tower. The tower itself is not a secret, and is quite visible. It held a secret passageway to a spring well, which came in quite handy during sieges.
From the Tainitskaya tower, the walls curve to the right to the Palace of the President. Kazan is the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, a republic of the Russian Federation. The head of the Republic is the President who lives inside the Kremlin. Next to the Presidential palace is the Annunciation Cathedral which was built on the site of the mosque of the Khans. The walls, ceiling and even the pillars of the church are painted with stunning frescoes, with imagery of Orthodox Christianity.
After taking a few pictures of all the monuments, I considered my Kremlin tour finished and decided to explore the rest of the city. After all, the city is more than the old fort from which it was ruled. But about that in another post, perhaps.
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Signing off with a few more sights from quaint Kazan!!
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