Browse Items (39 total)

"Kazan's Central Marketplace": The gostinnyi dvor was the primary marketplace in the city. Burned in 1774 and rebuilt with imperial support at the end of the 18th century, the market housed hundreds of shops. Most were owned by the city, and rented…

"The Main Tatar mosque in Kazan": one of Kazan's first two mosques, built in the 1760s. During the nineteenth century it was associated with the patronage of Kazan's Iunusov merchant dynasty, and came to be called the al-Marjani mosque, after…

A picture of St. Catherine's Lutheran Church from the late nineteenth century, as it appeared after its reconstruction in the 1860s. An earlier Lutheran church stood on the site from the late 1770s.

A view of the "Rybnoriadskaia" fishmarket square, ca. 1900

A view of the "wooden city" that lay behind the prosperous core area.

Seen at the end of the 19th century, this building was once the home of Karl Fuks. Fuks was a German transplant who became beloved in Kazan as professor, physician and scholar. One of his passions was amateur ethnographic study of the city's Tatar…

"View of the greeting of the Smolensk Mother of God in the city of Kazan": Every year the Sedmiozhernaia replica of the Smolensk Mother of God icon--a sacred relic reputed to have saved the city from more than one epidemic and disaster--was brought…

"Kazan Tatar horse race": With the highlands north-east of Kazan reserved for use by ethnic Russians, Tatar holidays like Saban were usually celebrated in the soggy meadows south of town. This picture depicts, in stylized form, a Tatar competition…

One of the earliest city maps of Kazan, developed by an engineering officer named Artemon Satsyperov in 1730.

A view of the Bulak Canal from the late nineteenth century.