Tukay Square

One of Kazan’s main public spaces bears the name of the poet Gabdulla Tukay; the square lies on Pushkin Street and is wedged between two of the city’s pedestrian arteries — Bauman and Peterburgskaya streets. Locals still more often call it simply ‘Koltso’ (‘the Ring’), in memory of the tram turning loop that operated here for decades.

In old times a low-lying area with a small lake occupied this spot; after the lake was filled in, a large fish market grew up here — under the 1768 regular city plan drawn up by the architect Vasily Kaftyrev, a diamond-shaped square was meant to be laid out on this site. In the nineteenth century Rybnoryadskaya Square was among the first in the city to be paved with stone, and in 1875 a horse-drawn tram line was run across it, later replaced by an electric tramway. The turning loop for the tramcars gave the square its popular name, which outlived several official renamings: in Soviet years it was called Kooperativnaya, then Kuibyshev Square, and it received its present name, Tukay, only in 1997.

The ensemble’s present-day appearance largely took shape by the city’s millennium in the early 2000s and combines Art Nouveau, Stalinist Empire style, and high-tech buildings. Next to the square stands the thirteen-story Tatarstan Hotel, built in 1970 to a design by the architect Munir Agishev, and since 1985 a monument to the revolutionary Mullanur Vakhitov has stood on the rise between Nekrasov and Butlerov streets. Nearby, at the start of Peterburgskaya Street, a granite rotunda was installed in 1997 to commemorate the laying of the Kazan Metro’s foundation stone, with a time capsule bearing a message to future passengers set into its base.

The first metro line, with its Ploshchad Tukaya station, opened in 2005, and even earlier, in 1970, one of the city’s first underground pedestrian crossings, with six exits, began operating beneath the square. At the exits onto Bauman Street stand the ‘Vodyanaya’ fountain, depicting the heroine of a fairy-tale ballad by Tukay, and a clock column with Tatar numerals on its face — a popular meeting spot for locals. In 2005 a bust of Lev Gumilev was placed in front of the rotunda, replacing a planned monument to Peter I that had been cancelled after protests.

Since 2006 the square’s dominant feature has been the Koltso shopping and entertainment complex, covering almost 47,000 square meters, built for the city’s anniversary and combining several architectural styles at once — from a Greco-Roman colonnade at the base to Byzantine-style domes at the top; the city’s architects have repeatedly criticized the building for its eclecticism. Nearby stand the GUM shopping center and the seventeen-story Grand Hotel Kazan.

Today Tukay Square remains the main transport and shopping hub of central Kazan, a meeting place and a starting point for the city’s walking routes. The historic nickname ‘Koltso’ has outlived the fish market, the tram tracks, and more than one renaming, remaining part of everyday local speech alongside the square’s official name honoring the national poet.