History of Kazan

Kazan was born on a cape at the confluence of the Kazanka and Volga rivers at the beginning of the 11th century, on the far northwestern frontier of Volga Bulgaria. The year 1005 is accepted as the official founding date. It is from this year that the city’s millennium was counted, with the celebration falling in 2005. The basis for this date came from archaeological finds in the Kremlin, including a Czech coin from the time of Prince Wenceslas, minted in Prague around 929–930. This coin and similar items from Scandinavia, Central Asia and the Volga region showed that a fortified settlement had stood here long before any written mentions and was already engaged in trade.

The name “Kazan” itself is traced by researchers to a Turkic word meaning “cauldron.” This may be linked either to the shape of the hollow near the fortress, or to a bend in the river, or to a legend about a golden vessel that a servant dropped into the water. There is no single accepted version, and even Tatar chroniclers of the 16th century passed down several variants of the name’s origin.

From a Bulgar outpost to a khan’s capital

For its first two centuries Kazan remained a small border fortress of Volga Bulgaria. Its political and spiritual center lay further south in Bolgar. Its position at the crossroads of routes from Scandinavia and Novgorod to Khwarezm and Baghdad made the region wealthy. Furs, honey, silver and Eastern textiles passed through the Bulgar wharves here. Kazan stood off to the side of the main southern markets, but it played the role of a customs post and a watchpoint on the northern border.

In 1236 the Mongol armies of Khan Batu descended on the Volga region. Bolgar and Bilyar — the largest Bulgar cities — were laid waste, and their populations streamed northward. Some of the refugees settled in Kazan, and the small fortress began to grow rapidly. By the 14th century it had become one of the notable trading centers of the Golden Horde. Craft quarters appeared in its suburbs, its own coins were minted, and mosques and madrasas were in operation.

Kazan became a full-fledged capital in 1438. The deposed Horde khan Ulugh Muhammad, having broken away from the internal strife of the Great Horde, took the city and proclaimed the independent Kazan Khanate. The new state encompassed the Middle Volga from the Vyatka to the mouth of the Kama and for over a century remained one of Moscow’s principal neighbors — at times an ally, at times an adversary.

By the middle of the 16th century Kazan had, by various estimates, between twenty-five and a hundred thousand inhabitants. Stone mosques with minarets and the khan’s palace rose on the hill, while the suburbs bustled with the life of artisans. Lively trading rows drew merchants, and a slave market took in captives from the Russian lands.

The confrontation with Moscow grew gradually. Ivan III and Vasily III launched campaigns against Kazan. They tried to install their own protégés on the khan’s throne. Ivan IV pushed the line to its conclusion.

1552: the turning point

In the summer of 1552 the young Muscovite tsar Ivan IV assembled an army that contemporaries estimated at one hundred and fifty thousand men and marched down the Volga. Shortly before, on the right bank near the western borders of the khanate, his soldiers cut and assembled from scratch the wooden town of Sviyazhsk — a floating fortress that became the staging base for the siege.

In August the Russian army invested Kazan. The siege lasted about six weeks. The Muscovites cut off the underground water conduit that supplied the fortress, and the military engineer Razmysl laid gunpowder mines beneath the walls. On 2 October 1552 the explosion brought down part of the fortifications, and Russian regiments stormed into the city through the breaches. Resistance was broken by the evening of the same day.

The fall of Kazan closed the history of the independent khanate and opened Moscow’s road to the Volga region and onward to the Urals. The price for the city was heavy: the suburbs were burned out, the population sharply reduced, and Tatars were forbidden to settle inside the Kremlin walls.

On the site of the destroyed fortress Ivan IV ordered a new one to be built — in stone. For this purpose the masters Postnik Yakovlev and Ivan Shiryai arrived from Pskov (the same architects later associated with Moscow’s Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed). By 1562 the Annunciation Cathedral was consecrated in the Kremlin — the oldest stone building in Kazan to have survived to the present day.

After the conquest the city was rebuilt anew. In the Kremlin rose the voivode’s court, monasteries and chancellery chambers, while the Tatar population was pushed beyond the Bulak River, where the Old Tatar Quarter took shape — a separate world with its own crafts and merchant class. In 1579, on the ashes of a Kazan fire, a famous event took place: Matrona, the daughter of a streltsy soldier, found an icon of the Mother of God among the burnt remains. It received the name of the Kazan Icon and became one of the chief sacred objects of Russian Orthodoxy.

In 1708, when Peter I was reshaping the country into governorates, he made Kazan the center of the enormous Kazan Governorate. It stretched from Nizhny Novgorod to the lower Volga and from the Vyatka to the Terek. From the first decades of the 18th century the city began to change its appearance distinctly. Under Peter, a shipyard appeared in the Admiralty Quarter, building vessels for the Caspian campaigns, and around it grew a Russian working-class district.

The quiet merchant existence was cut short in the summer of 1774. Yemelyan Pugachev’s army approached the city. There were not enough regular regiments to defend it, the rebels broke into the suburbs and burned a significant part of Kazan: the Merchant Yard, the suburban streets and many parish churches all went up in flames. The Kremlin held out, but afterwards the city had to be rebuilt almost from scratch.

The restoration coincided with the era of Catherine II’s enlightened absolutism. The empress visited Kazan in 1767 and for the first time since 1552 permitted Tatars to build stone mosques inside the city. By her word, between 1766 and 1770, the Al-Marjani Mosque rose in the Old Tatar Quarter — Kazan’s first stone mosque since the khanate era and an important sign of the policy of religious tolerance. The city received a regular plan, and within it appeared strict classical ensembles — the Merchant Yard, government offices, merchants’ mansions.

A university city: the 19th century

On 5 November 1804 Alexander I signed the charter of the Imperial Kazan University — the third in Russia by date of founding, after those of Moscow and Dorpat. From that day on Kazan was transformed into a major scientific center of the eastern part of the empire.

Here worked the mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky, the creator of non-Euclidean geometry, who held the post of rector for almost twenty years. Here too studied the chemist Butlerov, the orientalist Fuchs, and the writers Aksakov and Tolstoy. The university press was the first in the Volga region to print books in the Tatar language.

The 19th century turned Kazan into a major industrial and commercial hub. Grain, fish, timber and oil moved along the Volga — the city stood at a convenient transshipment point between the lower reaches and the northern governorates. Steamship traffic developed in the Admiralty Quarter; on the far side of the river rose the soap, leather and candle works of the Alafuzov and Krestovnikov families.

By the beginning of the 20th century Kazan had a telephone, a horse-drawn tram, the first electric power stations, gymnasia, a theological academy, and the Rodionov Institute for Noble Maidens. The Tatar merchant class built wealthy mansions and apartment houses in the Old Tatar Quarter, many of which have survived to this day.

Revolution, the TASSR and the Soviet decades

After the October Revolution and the heavy battles of the Civil War, in 1918 Kazan was seized for several weeks by units of the Czechoslovak Legion and the People’s Army. But soon the city was retaken by the Reds. At the same time the question of a new national statehood for the Tatars arose. On 27 May 1920 V. I. Lenin signed the decree on the formation of the Tatar ASSR as part of the RSFSR. Kazan became its capital. The first constituent congress of Soviets of the republic was held in September of the same year.

The Soviet five-year plans turned Kazan into an industrial city. In the 1930s and during the Great Patriotic War, major enterprises from Moscow and Leningrad were evacuated here. On their basis grew the Gorbunov Aircraft Plant, as well as engine-building, optical-mechanical and gunpowder works. The city became a center of heavy and defense industry. At the same time the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Union of Writers and many leading scholars and literary figures were evacuated here. For the duration of the war Kazan became one of the country’s scientific capitals.

By 1979 the population had passed one million. In the 1970s, the giant Kama Automobile Plant — KamAZ in Naberezhnye Chelny — was built nearby, and the Kazan agglomeration became the core of all the Volga region’s machine building.

From sovereignty to a new Kazan

On 30 August 1990 the republic’s Supreme Soviet adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, and Kazan became the capital first of the Tatar SSR, and from February 1992 — of the Republic of Tatarstan. The 1990s were difficult for the city: factories came to a halt, crime surged, and the center fell into disrepair. But by the turn of the century a large-scale reconstruction program had begun, tied to the upcoming anniversary.

In 2000 the ensemble of the Kazan Kremlin was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. For the city’s 1000th anniversary in 2005, lost holy sites were restored on the Kremlin grounds. On 24 June 2005 the first solemn namaz was performed in the new Qol Sharif Mosque — a white four-minaret mosque that stood next to the Annunciation Cathedral. At the same time the first line of the Kazan metro opened — the only one in the Volga region — and the historic center was transformed.

After that, events came thick and fast. In 2013 Kazan hosted the Summer Universiade. For it, dozens of sports venues were built, and the Kremlin Embankment and the Old Tatar Quarter were reconstructed. In 2015 the World Aquatics Championships were held, and in 2018 — matches of the FIFA World Cup at the Ak Bars Arena.

By the end of the 2010s the city had cemented its place in Russia’s top three tourist destinations alongside Moscow and St. Petersburg. In December 2023 the M-12 “Vostok” high-speed highway opened, and the road from the capital was cut to six and a half hours.

Today about 1.33 million people live in Kazan. A thousand years — from a Bulgar outpost to a city of a million with metro stations and a mosque under UNESCO protection — have fit into the compact territory between the Kazanka and the Volga, which can be walked across on foot in a couple of days.