Kazan: A City of Harmonious Contrasts

11 points4 km1 hour

Get to know Kazan, where an ancient kremlin sits beside modern rebuilds, a mosque beside an Orthodox cathedral, and city legends beside real historical events. The route starts in the heart of the city, the Kazan Kremlin, and leads along touristy Bauman Street to the quiet Black Lake park, Freedom Square and the National Library, ending on the Kremlin Embankment with views of “The Bowl” and the Ferris wheel.

Route author

Alina Rakhmanova

Things to do

👀 Watch city life
🏛️🕰️ Compare the eras
📸 Take photos

Route points (11)

Söyembikä Tower in Kazan

Point on route “Kazan: A City of Harmonious Contrasts”

Point 3

Söyembikä Tower

⭐️ Famous people • 🕵️ Urban legend • 📜 Historic site

Historical Background

Why go to Italy when we have our own Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Söyembikä Tower? People still argue about when and why it was built, and that has spawned a host of city legends. Historians, however, mostly date it to the 17th–18th centuries, that is, after Kazan was captured. The first documented image of the tower appears in a panoramic sketch of Kazan made by the Dutch traveler Cornelis de Bruijn in 1703. Some researchers believe the tower was built as a lookout post in the early 18th century, under Peter the Great.

Myths and Legends

There's a whole heap of legends about it, all contradicting one another. According to one, Queen Söyembikä of Kazan built the tower herself to honor the memory of her beloved husband, Safa Giray, after his death in 1549. According to another, the tower's seven tiers stand for the seven days Ivan the Terrible took to build it after capturing Kazan in 1552. Söyembikä is named as the one behind the project here too, but with a different ending: she supposedly threw herself from the seventh tier. Her reasons vary from version to version; tourists are most often told that the Russian tsar had asked her to marry him. So the tower is also a monument to how one story can sprout several mutually exclusive plots, all of them alive and well. There's also a superstition: touch the tower's walls and make a wish, and it will surely come true.

Architectural Features

The tower was never meant to lean: because of its foundation and the soil, it tilted by almost two meters (6.5 ft). Its movement has now been stopped, so tourists, the Kremlin and the tower itself are in no danger.