Peterburgskaya Street

Peterburgskaya Street is a partly pedestrian thoroughfare in the historic center of Kazan and one of the city’s most recognizable promenades. It runs from Tukay Square in the northwest to Nazarbayev Street in the southeast, and its present appearance and name took shape in the early 2000s as part of preparations for Kazan’s millennium anniversary.

Before its modern renaming the street was called Georgievskaya, and during the Soviet decades, Sverdlov Street; administratively it has belonged to several city districts over time, from the pre-revolutionary 4th District to the Bauman, Molotov, and Vakhitov districts, and for a decade and a half of the 20th century it simultaneously housed the executive committees of two districts at once. The city authorities carried out the renaming and the large-scale reconstruction of the pedestrian section jointly with Russia’s northern capital, whose financial assistance gave the renewed street its name — in memory of the symbolic kinship between the two cities.

The street’s total length is about 1,800 meters, of which 530 meters at the start of the route were made pedestrian-only. The reconstruction turned this section into a stylized “corner of St. Petersburg”: the paving of the esplanade is patterned to evoke the outlines of St. Petersburg’s canals, spanned by decorative footbridges with railings, and further along the pedestrian zone stands a rotunda echoing the appearance of Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt. At the start of the street stands a monument to the orientalist Lev Gumilyov, near which are the large Koltso shopping center and the Tatarstan Hotel, while closer to Tukay Square rises the Grand Hotel Kazan, whose roof houses an observation deck.

Among the memorial features on the pedestrian esplanade is a stele topped with a scaled-down model of the galley Tver, recalling Empress Catherine II’s journey down the Volga and her stop in Kazan in 1767. At the far end of the street, at its junction with Nazarbayev Street, an Avenue of Glory has been laid out with historic tram cars and a memorial bas-relief, and nearby stretches the Tugan Avylym complex with its carved wooden buildings, as well as the fairy-tale-styled Palace of Children’s Creativity, home to the country’s largest puppet theater, Ekiyat; around it, a summer flower festival and a winter ice town are held every year.

Today Peterburgskaya Street combines the functions of a tourist promenade and a business district: it is home to the gallery of fashion designer Slava Zaitsev, the Idea technopark with the republic’s venture fund, an IT park, and numerous offices and hotels. The route is bookended by two metro stations — Ploshchad Tukaya at the start and Sukonnaya Sloboda at the end of the street — while evening illumination and street sculptures make walking the esplanade a popular pastime for visitors year-round.

Having travelled the path from an ordinary city street to a themed pedestrian route, Peterburgskaya Street has become one of the symbols of interregional cultural ties and of Kazan’s renewed tourist center.