Azimov Mosque

The Azimov Mosque, formerly known as the Factory Mosque or the Sixth Cathedral Mosque, stands in the Old Tatar Settlement and stands out among Kazan’s historic mosques for having the tallest minaret — reaching a height of fifty-one meters. On the same plot as the mosque, a two-story madrasah building and the wooden house where the parish mullah once lived have both survived, so the complex still conveys the appearance of a Tatar parish from the century before last.

The first house of prayer on this site — wooden and without a minaret — was built in 1804 with funds from the pilgrim-hajji Gabdelmazit Abubakirov; for Friday and holiday prayers, however, parishioners still had to go to the Iske-Tash Mosque. Four decades later the cramped building was replaced by a new wooden mosque with a minaret, built by the merchant Mustafa Azimov, head of the Tatar city magistracy, but before long it too could no longer accommodate the growing congregation. In the 1860s an even more spacious wooden building was erected by Mustafa’s eldest son, Murtaza Azimov, who later built an entirely new stone mosque at his own expense, with the work completed in 1887–1890.

The single-story building, with its two prayer halls, combines features of late Eclecticism with the national-romantic motifs characteristic of Tatar religious architecture at the end of the 19th century, its façades decorated with ornamentation in the spirit of Islamic Eastern architecture. Nearby, a two-story stone building for the Gaffariya madrasah was later added, built in 1871 to a design by the architect Anikin.

The parish was officially known as the Factory parish, since most of its members worked at soap-manufacturing plants, but over time the name Azimov took hold — in memory of the generosity of Murtaza Azimov, who donated to the improvement of the workers’ quarters and earned the respect of the entire mahalla, though he did not live to see the stone building’s opening. During the Soviet years the mosque’s imams and trustees were subjected to repression, but the former muezzin Mukhametgali Sabitov continued for many years to secretly hold services and teach children the basics of Islam. In 1939 the republic’s authorities officially ended worship here by decree; unlike other mosques, the minaret was left untouched at the time, but the prayer halls were used as a dormitory and a school for film projectionists, and the mosque itself became surrounded by industrial development.

The building was returned to believers in 1989, and reconstruction and restoration were carried out in 1990–1992 to a design by the architect Rafael Bilyalov. Today the Azimov Mosque is a working parish of the Old Tatar Settlement, where services have continued for over a century despite demolition, repression, and the industrial surroundings of the Soviet era.

Having travelled the path from a modest wooden prayer house to a stone temple with the tallest minaret among the city’s Tatar mosques, the Azimov Mosque preserves the memory of several generations of a merchant family whose donations helped the surrounding district grow.