5 Days in Kazan

Enter the way everyone does, through the white clock tower on the south side. The Spasskaya Tower is named after the Savior church (Spasskaya) that Pskov masters built beside it, and it's the main gate of a fortress that Ivan the Terrible had built on the ruins of the khans' castle. Pskov masters, among them Postnik Yakovlev and Ivan Shiryai, rebuilt the Kremlin in white local stone after 1552. Much of what you see is later renovation, but the outline is the one that was given a UNESCO listing in 2000.

Unlike Moscow's, this Kremlin is a place where you just walk in and stroll. The Spasskaya Tower is open at all hours, and the Taynitskaya Tower on the north wall is open from 6:00 to 20:00 between October and April. Take the central path first and see how the buildings line up before you buy any ticket. The museum inside the tower tells the story of the walls and of the tower's clock and star. It's small and decent, not essential.

The mosque is named after Kul Sharif, a 16th-century imam who died defending Kazan in 1552 with his students, after which Ivan the Terrible's men destroyed the khanate's main mosque, believed to have stood in the Kremlin. The new one was begun in 1996 and opened on 24 June 2005, with some 17,000 people in the crowd. It's a modern building on a medieval idea: four main minarets 58 meters high, a turquoise dome and white marble that goes pink at sunset.

Go in properly dressed (women cover their hair) and take your shoes off. From 11 November to 24 December the mosque is open from 8:00 to 19:00 (the rest of the year from 8:30 to 21:00), with a break for the Friday prayer from 11:30 to 13:15. The basement holds the Museum of Islamic Culture, open daily from 9:00 to 19:30. It has Golden Horde tiles, a model of the 14th-15th century Nur-Ali mosque that stood in the Kremlin, a tiny 19th-century Quran and an interactive Turning the Pages of the Quran. Worth an hour.

The Kremlin museum-reserve lists five cafes on its own site, and Tatar by Tubatay is the cheap and simple one: a halal Tatar kitchen open from 10:00 to 21:00 with an average bill of about 550 RUB. Halal places usually don't serve alcohol.

This is the place for a first echpochmak, the triangular meat-and-potato pie, with a bowl of broth beside it. If you want to compare, Alan Ash (national cuisine cafe, 9:00-20:00, around 500 RUB) is the other budget option, and Aulak is a modern Tatar coffee shop. Tourist locations are not where Kazan eats best, but they are honest about prices and good enough for a lunch between two sights.

Here is the Orthodox half of the Kremlin, and the oldest building in it, built in the 1550s and 1560s by Pskov masters Postnik Yakovlev and Ivan Shiryai from pale local stone rather than brick. Ivan the Terrible wanted a five-tier bell tower to echo the Ivan the Great bell tower in Moscow. The Soviets pulled it down in 1930, and the cathedral itself was taken from the church after the revolution. A 1995 decree ordered its restoration, the same decree that brought back the mosque.

The date to remember is 21 July 2005, a month after the mosque opened. Patriarch Alexius II and Tatarstan's president placed a copy of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God here, one that had been returned to Russia in 2004 by Pope John Paul II. Together with the mosque, it's the picture the republic wants you to take home. Inside, a small museum tells the cathedral's own story, and the building is open from 8:00 to 19:00 from 11 November to 24 December (9:00 to 19:00 the rest of the year).

The Söyembikä Tower, with the crescent on top, is the symbol of Kazan, and nobody agrees on its age. Some scholars date it to the turn of the 18th century, when tiered towers were fashionable in Russia, others think it's older and has Central Asian echoes. The legend is better than the evidence: Söyembikä, the last queen of the khanate, threw herself from the top tier, hence the name. If the tower is an 18th-century building, the queen never saw it.

It used to lean almost two meters, and was stabilized in the 1930s and 1990s, so now it just stands, next to the presidential palace. A 2023 design of the 1,000-ruble banknote showed the tower with its crescent and was halted after the Orthodox Church objected. Even a banknote can set off an argument here.

Hermitage-Kazan is an exhibition center linked to the great Saint Petersburg museum, and it shows rotating exhibitions. That makes it a lottery, and a fair one. Look at the poster by the entrance before you pay.

If the program doesn't interest you, use the time for the Spasskaya Tower museum, or save it for the Museum of the History of Statehood on day 5. A combined ticket with the Natural History Museum costs about 9 EUR (800 RUB).

Sunset comes at about 3:45 pm in mid-November, so most of the Kremlin walk happens in the evening anyway. Leave through the Taynitskaya Tower (open until 20:00) and follow the Kremlin Embankment along the Kazanka, where you see the white walls and the Söyembikä Tower from below.

It's a flat walk and nothing here needs a ticket. Come back through the Spasskaya Tower, which is open at any hour, and look at the Kul Sharif minarets against the dark sky.

Five minutes from the Kremlin stands a cathedral that looks 200 years old and is not. The earlier cathedral was built in 1798-1808 in classical style on the spot where the Kazan icon of the Mother of God was found. The Soviets blew it up in 1932. In November 2015 the president of Tatarstan signed a decree to rebuild it, in the same decree that created the Bulgar Islamic Academy, and the new cathedral was consecrated on 21 July 2021 by Patriarch Kirill.

It's a copy of the old plan, 44 meters tall with five domes, the cathedral of the Kazan diocese and the main church of the Bogoroditsky monastery, so dress modestly. As a sight it tells you how the republic handles memory: it rebuilds what was destroyed, mosque and cathedral alike.

Bauman Street is Kazan's pedestrian main street, from the foot of the Kremlin to Tukay Square, and it has been a trading street since the khans. It was once called Prolomnaya, Breach Street, after the gaps Ivan the Terrible's explosions blew in the wall in 1552, and was renamed in 1930 for Nikolay Bauman, a revolutionary born in Kazan in 1873. The bricks are multicolored, and there are lanterns, lindens and a lot of statues.

Look for the statue of the singer Fyodor Shalyapin near the Epiphany church where he was baptized (the church was built in 1731-56), and the Alley of Tatar Stars, honoring Tatar singers and actors since 2003. Honest verdict: it's the most touristy street in Kazan, with souvenirs and tourist cafes, and it's still where the city goes for a stroll.

A wooden church stood here from 1565. The stone cathedral came after Peter the Great visited Kazan in May 1722, on his way to the Persian campaign, and stayed with the cloth merchant Ivan Mikhlyaev, whose house stood next to it. The local builders ignored the fact that a tall vault needs a different plan, and it collapsed in the night. Peter sent builders from Moscow, and the church was consecrated in 1726. It's the best example of Petrine baroque in Kazan, and an exceptional style for the city. Almost every emperor since Catherine II came to see it, and the young Shalyapin sang in its choir.

It also has a Soviet chapter: in 1931 the parish of the Kazan Cathedral, blown up the next year, was moved here as the churches were being closed one by one. Go in for the carved iconostasis, restored in the 1860s.

Kazan University was founded on 17 November 1804 by Alexander I and is the second oldest university in Russia that has worked without a break. Its alumni read like a syllabus: Nikolai Lobachevsky, the creator of non-Euclidean geometry, was its rector from 1827 to 1846, Leo Tolstoy studied here, and Vladimir Lenin was expelled from the law faculty in December 1887 for student protest.

It's a working university, so you walk the grounds and look at the buildings and the monuments, not tour rooms. Use it to see that the city is young as well as old: Kazan is a student town, with many foreign students among them.

Walk west from Tukay Square to the Central Market, the big city market near the Kazan-1 railway station, to see what a Tatar pantry looks like. Look for kort (dried salty cheese), honey, dried apricots and horse-meat sausage (kazylyk), and ask for chak-chak by weight to take home.

Prices are in rubles, and a foreign card won't work, so bring notes. Don't count on English, but pointing works. The honey and dried fruit are things Tatar cooking leans on, and they travel well.

Finish with the metro from Ploshchad Tukaya to Kremlyovskaya, one stop. It's not Moscow, and nobody builds a day around it, but Kazan has a single line of 11 stations, which opened on 27 August 2005 for the city's millennium. It's one of the newest metros in Russia, with Tatar and Islamic motifs in the stations, and it is quick. Kremlyovskaya's exits are right next to the Kremlin.

The metro runs from 6:00 to midnight. Foreign cards may not work at the turnstile, so pay in cash or buy a token. Use it to get your bearings, and for the one stretch where it saves your feet.

The first mosque built in Kazan under Russian rule, in 1766-70 with Catherine the Great's permission and the donations of the city's Tatars. After the long ban on new mosques, this was a revolution in stone: medieval Tatar tradition mixed with provincial baroque, two floors and two prayer halls. It's the oldest working mosque in Tatarstan and the only one in Kazan that wasn't closed in the Soviet period.

It's named for Shihabetdin Märcani, a Tatar scholar who was imam here in the 19th century, and it stands on the shore of Lake Kaban. It's an active mosque, so go outside prayer times, dress modestly, and don't count on being able to enter. The outside is the sight.

The street is named for Kayum Nasyri, a Tatar scholar and encyclopedist, and was made a pedestrian street in 2013 after restoration. It's the spine of the Old Tatar Quarter, which grew fast after Catherine II visited in 1767 and lifted the limits on stone mosques, and after her 1773 decree on tolerance of all religions. Merchants and manufacturers built mansions here, and the quarter holds the houses of people who shaped Tatar culture.

Be honest about what you're walking through. Kazan's rebuilding since 2000 demolished a large number of historic districts, and the Old Tatar Quarter is partly restored, partly rebuilt and partly still industrial in its southern end. It rewards slow walking, signs in Tatar and Russian and a look into courtyards, not an architectural checklist.

This is a house museum with a twist: the hostess receives you as a guest in a recreated 19th-century Tatar home, and you start by taking your shoes off to walk on old carpets. The visit lasts about an hour and ends with herbal tea and sweets. The private museum was started by Dmitry and Raushania Polosin, and a workshop on making chak-chak is offered.

Chak-chak is the sweet that brides brought to the wedding feast: small balls of fried dough heaped into a mound and drenched in hot honey. The museum is the clearest answer to what Tatar hospitality means, tea first and everything else after. It's a tourist experience, but a well-made one. Open daily from 10:00 to 20:00 at Parizhskoy Kommuny 18A.

The lake is the heart of the quarter, and the Märcani Mosque and the old houses are grouped along its shore. Walk from the mosque along the water and look back at the minaret. In winter the surface may freeze or hold slush, so keep to the shore.

It ties the day together, because this is the area where Kazan residents who stayed loyal were resettled outside the walls in the 16th century, after Ivan the Terrible took the city.

Tugan Avylym is a Tatar national complex on Tufana Minnullina street, and its site gives 9:00 to midnight for both the complex and the restaurant. It's a themed place, with a pancake house with a wood-fired oven, a bistro, a museum for cooking classes and a gastro-theater where the dinner is staged. It's a show, and it knows it.

Order the Tatar table: broth with pilmän dumplings, an echpochmak, gubadia with its layers of rice, dried fruit and meat, and finish with tea and chak-chak. The walk back to Tukay Square takes about 20 minutes, or take a taxi.

Raifa grew from a hermit's cell. A monk named Filaret settled on the shore of the Sumy lake in 1613 in woods that the Mari people held sacred, and the monastery was blessed in 1661. In 1668 it received a copy of the Georgian icon of the Mother of God, which became its main shrine. It's the largest working men's monastery of the Kazan diocese.

Its 20th-century story is the sad part: it was closed in 1918 and from the 1930s held a prison for political prisoners and later a juvenile colony, with workshops in the churches. The Georgian icon came back on 23 June 1991 and most of the complex was restored in the 1990s. Walk the lakeshore, see the Georgian Cathedral built in 1842 and the Trinity Cathedral. The water-blessing chapel is open daily from 7:00 to 20:00.

Sviyazhsk is a village of 243 people (2017), so eat sensibly. The cafes on the island cater to summer visitors, and in November the choice may be limited. Eat a proper breakfast, carry snacks and a flask of tea, and ask your driver which place on the island is open before you commit.

A village lunch of soup, a pie and tea is the right size, and it's also your warm-up before the walk. Don't plan a long meal: the daylight is the scarce thing today.

The monastery was founded in 1555 together with the Kazan diocese, as part of Ivan the Terrible's plan to settle the Volga, and the Assumption Cathedral was built in 1556-61. The frescoes in the cathedral cover about 1,080 square meters, among the best preserved from the end of the 16th century. UNESCO listed the monastery in 2017.

The 20th century is not hidden. In Soviet times the grounds held a secret police camp and a juvenile colony, later a psychiatric hospital, which left in 1994. During restoration, remains of executed prisoners were found, and a monastery monk said at least 5,000 people were buried along the walls. That figure is his claim, not a verified count. It's a heavy place and a moving one.

Sviyazhsk is the story of 1551. Ivan the Terrible's engineers cut a wooden fortress near Uglich, took it apart, floated it down the Volga on rafts and put it back together here in four weeks. From the new town the army besieged Kazan in 1552. The wooden Trinity Church of 1551 still stands, the bell tower of Saint Nicholas church dates from 1556 and there's a convent of John the Baptist.

It's called an island because the Kuybyshev reservoir was built in the 1950s, but a causeway connects it to the shore. The sun sets early, so plan the last hour for the shore and start back before it's fully dark.

Be clear about what the Temple of All Religions is: it's not a temple. It's a private architectural fantasy that the artist Ildar Khanov (1940-2013) began building in the early 1990s in the Staroye Arakchino district, after travels in Tibet and India. It combines an Orthodox church, a mosque, a synagogue, a Buddhist pagoda and other styles, with 12 domes by 2007 out of a planned 16, one for each major world religion. No services are held, and as of 2016 none of the faiths whose forms it borrows recognized it as theirs.

That honesty is the reason to go. It's a strange and affecting place, built with the help of Khanov's patients, a mix of kitsch and sincerity, and a good counterpart to the official coexistence of the Kremlin. A fire in April 2017 hit the complex; the building was saved and repairs began that July. Hours and ticket prices change, so check them before you go.

Back at the Kremlin, this small museum sits in the former palace church beside the Söyembikä Tower, in the oldest part of the fortress. It covers the states that belong to the Tatar past: Volga Bulgaria, the Golden Horde, the Kazan Khanate, then the Tatar republic within the USSR and today's Tatarstan.

You see a reconstructed throne of the khans of Kazan, Golden Horde coins, 15th-16th century texts in Arabic script and Soviet-era awards. It gives the other half of the Kremlin story, in the republic's own words, which is the point: the museum is where Tatarstan presents itself. Read it as such. It's open Saturday 10:00 to 18:00, with the ticket office closing at 17:30.

From the Kremlin walk north along the dam over the Kazanka toward the Family Center. This is the classic view of Kazan: the white walls of the Kremlin, the Söyembikä Tower, the mosque's turquoise dome, and the water. Come about an hour before sunset, which is around 3:45 pm in mid-November, for the best light.

In winter the river may be partly frozen. The embankments are wide and flat, a good place for a slow walk after a day of sights.

The Chasha, "the bowl", is the city's modern symbol. It opened on 5 July 2013 as the main wedding palace of Tatarstan, and it's built in the form of a kazan, a cast cauldron over a fire, which is also the city's name. The architect is the Buryat sculptor Dashi Namdakov. Three lifts lead to a roof deck 32 meters above the river with a view of the Kremlin (about 2 EUR, 200 RUB, in autumn 2025, open 10:00 to 20:00), and the evening lighting plays with the fire under the pot.

Sculptures of pairs of zilants (the dragon symbol of Kazan) and leopards (the symbol of the republic) with their young stand around it, added in 2016. It's kitsch, and it's also the best skyline photo in the city. The deck runs on a seasonal schedule, so check that it is open in winter.

For the last dinner go back to the Kremlin walls. Chirem is a Tatar cuisine restaurant listed on the Kremlin museum-reserve's own site, open 12:00 to 23:00, with an average bill of about 1,500 RUB, one of the pricier of the Kremlin's cafes.

Finish the Tatar menu here: pelmeni in broth, a meat pie, gubadia if they have it, and a pot of strong tea with milk. If you want something lighter, Ak Chinayak is a tea lounge in the same group, open 12:00 to 22:00. The Kremlin gates and the metro at Kremlyovskaya are a short walk away.