The Mergasov House

The Mergasov House, at the intersection of Dzerzhinsky Street and Kavi Najmi Street, is one of the first and most recognisable monuments of avant-garde architecture in Kazan. The five-storey building, with its corner balconies and restrained decoration, remained for many years a symbol of the transitional era from Classicism to Constructivism in Soviet residential construction.

The house was built in 1928, and its grand opening took place on 11 November of that year. Sources differ on the authorship of the design: some name architects Pyotr Speransky and Sergei Glagolev, others Dmitry Fyodorov; according to one version, the design was developed by the Moscow engineer-architect Glagolev and realised in Kazan by Speransky. The building took its name from Mergasov Lane, where the estate of Colonel Mergasov had previously stood; today this is the area around Kavi Najmi Street. The house became the first apartment building in Kazan to be connected to a piped water supply.

In plan the building is U-shaped, with seven entrances; it was originally four storeys, with a fifth added later. The architecture combines a Classicist symmetry of composition and a raised central volume with features of Constructivism — restrained decoration, projecting stairwell volumes, and corner balconies. Construction employed the experimental material kamyshit, panels of pressed reed bound with wire, as well as brick and timber left over from the dismantled buildings of the Transfiguration Monastery (Spaso-Preobrazhensky).

Over the years the house was home to prominent figures of Tatar culture. From 1931 to 1952 it was home to the writer Kavi Najmi, whose flat was visited by the poets Khasan Tufan and Hadi Taktash, as well as by the composer Salih Saydashev and by Musa Jalil. The children’s writer Abdulla Alish lodged in the same house from 1938 to 1941. Among the house’s legends is the story of fourteen graves discovered when the foundations were laid, on the site of a former cemetery — a discovery to which residents of Kazan attribute the house’s reputation as a “cursed” building.

By the 2010s the residents had been fully relocated, and since 2019 the windows and doors of the empty building have been boarded up; the landmark has survived several major fires — in 2019 and twice in 2024. Despite its status as a cultural heritage site, the house long remained outside the city’s large-scale restoration programmes, and its residents had been waiting for relocation since as far back as the 1990s. A project for adapting the building for residential use with underground parking has been developed and has passed state expert review.

The Mergasov House remains one of the few genuine monuments of Kazan Constructivism — a witness to the brief but vivid era of Soviet architectural experimentation in the 1920s. Despite decades of neglect, the building continues to attract the attention of Kazan residents and architectural historians alike as a rare example of a transitional style, still awaiting full revival.