The Citadel

The South-eastern Round Tower

	The foundation of the Nothern Khan's Tower

The historical citadel of the Kazan Kremlin is an archaeological monument that is unrivalled. The underlying strata, beginning at the threshold of the 10th and 11th centuries, range from 2 to 8 metres in thickness. In the oldest, northern part of the citadel, remains of stone and wooden public housing and utility buildings have been discovered, as well as everyday and religious artifacts belonging to the culture of the Golden Horde and the Kazan Khanate epochs.

Among the archaeologically exposed ancient monuments are two white-stone mausoleums of the Kazan khans, belonging to Mahmud (who ruled from 1445 until the beginning of 1460s) and Muhammad Amin (between 1487-1496 and 1502-1518). Also featured are the oldest stone wall dating from the 12th to 17th centuries and the remains of a public building from the first part of the 16th century.

This is an architectural complex with an extant 10th-century masonry fortification system, which is the only remaining evidence of the lost culture of the pre-Mongol and Golden Horde periods in Kazan. Foreign i coins and decorations of the 10th-11th centuries found in the Kremlin convincingly prove Kazan's thousand-year-old history as a military, governmental and commercial centre of the Middle Volga region.

Tainitskaya Tower

The original structure and layout of the city remained essentially unchanged from the Bulgar period, when it embodied the Oriental features of the most north-eastern branch of early medieval Eastern architecture. In all subsequent periods this structure furnished the basis for continuous development of the city of Kazan.

	The Preobrazhenskaya Tower

The Nameless Round Tower

The Kremlin zone forms an irregular polygon, elongated from north to south because of the site's topography. Since ancient times, the citadel has crowned the crest of an elevated terrace, which rises to a maximum of 28 metres, on the left bank of the Kazanka river. Historically, the citadel was surrounded by water on three sides: the Kazanka river, the Bulak channel and Kaban lake, and the Black, Baths and Unclean lakes.

Such a location made the Kremlin all but impregnable. Even in later years, the Kazan citadel, which was built to the highest standards of its time, kept its reputation as one of the finest in Russia.

The fortification complex of the Kazan Kremlin includes 16th to 18th century walls and towers as I well as the archaeological remains of defences dating back to the 10th and 16th centuries. The length of the external perimeter is 1,800 metres. The extant walls and other fortifications reflected the continuity of architectural traditions and were built in several stages.

According to scholars, the citadel (kerman) of the khan's epoch had at least four passage towers, the location of which remained unchanged. These are the Nur-Ali (Muraleeva or Tainitskaya) Tower, the Elbugin Gates (Voskresenskaya), Sboilivaya Gates (Dmitrovskaya) and Tyumenskaya (Preobrazhenskaya) Tower. The old towers representing elevated and fortified shooting spots with narrow loopholes were located along the perimeter of the fortress, separated by the distance of an arrow's flight.

The South-western Round Tower

The main Tatar fortress, which by the 15th century already occupied approximately half of the Kremlin's present day territory, was surrounded by a strong wall of an oak and pine framework filled with earth and stones, and in places, the thickness of the walls was as much as 6 to 7 metres. The modern-day territory of the Kremlin, as scholars now think, was divided in die times of the khans by the Tazik fortification trench (Tezitsky ravine). Walls with rectangular passage and defensive towers also surrounded the other half of the citadel. It is believed that in the same period, at least some of the towers were constructed of stone, perhaps with the assistance of Italian architects from the Lombard School, who at the end of the 15th century built the walls, towers and temples of the Moscow Kremlin.

The Consistory Tower

From 1552 to 1556, the Pskov masons led by Postnik Yakovlev and Ivan Shiryai reconstructed the citadel's fortifications in the north and south, generally replicating the configuration and location of the former Tatar fortress, and occasionally incorporating some of its features into the new white-stone fortifications. The renewed citadel had a total of 13 towers, the names of which, starting from the south and moving clockwise, are: the Spasskaya Passage, the South-western Round, the Preobrazhenskaya Passage, the Pentahedral, the Nameless Round, the South-eastern Round, Tainitskaya, the Northern Round, the Voskresenskaya Passage, the North-eastern Round, the Dmitrovskaya Passage, the Consistory and the North-western Round.

	The Spasskaya Tower

In the 19th century, the Northern, North-eastern, Dmitrovskaya Passage, Pentahedral and North-western Towers were pulled down. The present-day Kremlin towers stand out of the walls, divided into 2 to 4 tiers with rectangular and arched shot holes. The upper tier is topped by rectangular dentils and covered by tented roofs. The towers are connected by walls, some of which are made of stone (mid-16th century), some are in brick and stone (late-16th century) and some only brick (18th-19th centuries). These are constructed of bricks in two tiers totaling 8 to 12 metres in height, topped by rectangular dentils on a 16th-17th century wall or dovetails with embrasure archlets in sections reconstructed in the 18th century. The battle passage has a timber roof.

The Spasskaya Tower

The main entrance to the Kremlin goes through the Spasskaya Tower with the tower church of the Vernicle. It was built by Postnik Yakovlev and Ivan Shiryai between 1556 and 1562. The church was originally intended to keep Ivan the Terrible's icon and other relics of the Russian attack on Kazan in 1552. It was once also used to hold the military standard of Prince Dmytri Donskoi, the hero of the battle of Kulikovo Pole.

Originally tetrahedral and two-tiered with an archway, in the 1670s two more brick-built octahedrons were added to the tower. The lower octahedron has a clock while the upper one has arched holes and serves as a clock bell tower. The church runs the length of the tower, and its facade is embellished with 16th century ornamentations.