Port of Five Seas

“Port of Five Seas” is a monumental sgraffito composition on the facade of the “Volga” hotel at 1 Said-Galiyev Street, in Kazan’s historic Old Tatar Settlement. The name refers to the fact that, through the unified deep-water system of rivers and canals, Kazan, standing on the Volga, is connected to five seas — the White, Baltic, Black, Azov and Caspian — the same expression long used to describe Moscow.

The composition was created in 1961–1963 by monumental artists Sergei Bubennov, Vasil Malikov and Rustem Kildibekov, specifically for the opening of the then-new “Volga” hotel. Alongside the “Port of Five Seas” sgraffito, the same team of artists created a companion composition, “Peoples of the Volga Region”, on another part of the same building’s facade. Both works became among the first examples of the sgraffito technique in post-war Kazan and part of a broader wave of monumental decorative art that adorned the city’s new public buildings in the 1960s.

The subject is built on symbolic images — electricity, oil, water, fish — through which the artists depicted the everyday life of the peoples of the Volga region and the idea that it was the great river that linked the northern and southern lands, generously endowing them with its riches. The panel’s colour scheme is restrained, almost monochrome: a dark background tone predominates, against which the figures stand out in patches of brick-red and grey. Some critics found the composition overly flat and simplified in drawing, but the scale of the artists’ concept and the technique itself, rare for the city, made the work a notable event in Kazan art of its time.

The very concept of a “port of five seas” arose from the completion, by the mid-20th century, of the unified deep-water canal system in the European part of the USSR, which directly connected the cities of the Volga to five seas. As applied to Kazan, this image emphasised the city’s new role as a major transport hub at the crossing of waterways — a theme the artists gave form to as a wall panel in a prominent spot of the historic quarter.

In late 2025 the sgraffito, together with six other Soviet-era panels and mosaics in Kazan, received the temporary status of an identified cultural heritage site, but in 2026 the relevant republican committee declined to include it in the register of monuments on a permanent basis: under current legislation a separate wall composition cannot be a standalone object of protection if it forms part of a building’s facade — only the building as a whole can be protected. The committee acknowledged the work’s cultural value and proposed creating a special register of monumental art objects, a decision that drew criticism from the expert community, which pointed to the lack of transparency in the refusal procedure.

The fate of “Port of Five Seas” now depends directly on the future of the “Volga” hotel building itself: without separate protected status, the sgraffito remains a monument of the 1960s whose survival is guaranteed only for as long as its architectural foundation stands.