Kul Sharif Mosque

The Kul Sharif Mosque is the principal cathedral mosque of Tatarstan and Kazan, built within the Kremlin as a recreation of the legendary temple destroyed when the city was captured in 1552. It bears the name of Imam Kul Sharif, who died defending the Kazan fortress. Today it is one of the city’s most recognisable silhouettes and a functioning spiritual centre of the republic.

According to tradition, at least five stone mosques stood behind the high walls of the khan’s capital, and one of them was headed by the statesman Kul Sharif. On 2 October 1552 Russian troops took the city; the defenders fought to the last, the imam himself was killed, and after the assault a citywide fire damaged the main multi-towered mosque as well. The new authorities ordered the surviving Muslim buildings demolished, and for many generations the open practice of Islam in Kazan was banned. In the autumn of 1995 the republic’s leader Mintimer Shaimiev ordered the shrine rebuilt, a republic-wide design competition was announced, and construction on the site of the former Cadet School was funded largely by voluntary donations: more than forty thousand citizens and organisations contributed. The mosque opened on 24 June 2005, for the millennium anniversary of Kazan.

In plan the building is formed by two squares overlaid at an angle, producing an octagon, and its walls are assembled from eight intersecting pointed arches bearing Quranic ayats carved in marble. The four main minarets rise to 58 metres, complemented by two smaller minarets and two half-minarets at the entrance. The central dome, 39 metres high and 17 metres in diameter, is pierced by tulip-shaped windows, and its interior decoration echoes the outline of the historic Kazan Cap, the crown of the Kazan khans. Marble and granite for the finishing were brought from the Urals, the carpets in the prayer halls were a gift from the government of Iran, and the five-metre crystal chandelier was made in the Czech Republic.

The design of the complex was led by a team of architects who had won the open competition, and by the summer of 2001 the building already stood complete with its domes and spires, though finishing work continued for another four years. The total cost of construction is estimated at around four hundred million roubles, making the mosque’s erection one of the most notable examples of public-funded construction in post-Soviet Tatarstan.

The prayer hall holds one and a half thousand people, and the square in front of the mosque can accommodate around ten thousand more. The basement floor houses a museum of Islamic culture and the history of Islam’s spread in the Volga region, and it is also here that nikah, the ceremonial wedding rite, is performed. The upper tier with its balconies is open to tourists as an observation deck, offering a view of the whole Kremlin ensemble. The white marble façades take on a pink glow at sunset, and the turquoise dome and minaret spires, together with the evening illumination, have long been a calling card of Kazan.

Recreated four and a half centuries after the destruction of the original, the Kul Sharif Mosque unites the memory of the fallen defenders of the khan’s capital with its modern status as a spiritual and tourist centre of Tatarstan.