Cannon Yard

The Cannon Yard is a complex of four historic buildings within the Kazan Kremlin, where weapons for the garrison were made and repaired for centuries. Today the complex holds the status of a federal cultural monument and remains one of the few buildings in the Kremlin where an industrial past is visible in the architecture itself.

The yard arose in the second half of the 17th century on the site where the khan’s guard had been quartered in the time of the Kazan Khanate. Originally a single U-shaped building stood here, but over time a quadrangle of several buildings grew up around the foundry yard, squeezed between the Kremlin’s main street and the fortress wall. At the end of the 18th century the territory was expanded using land from the Trinity-Sergius Monastery, which had by then been closed. Work at the yard stopped after a major fire in 1815, and the emptied buildings were later handed over to the Cadet School.

The complex comprises east, south, north and west buildings. The main, eastern building faces onto today’s Sheinkman Passage; it was built in the first half of the 18th century for a weapons factory and arsenal, and rebuilt in 1836. Three two-storey volumes are joined by single-storey link sections, the façade is finished in the Baroque style — with a rusticated base and pilasters — and an octagonal spire crowned with a vase-shaped cupola rises above the central section; a weathervane bears the image of the zilant, the winged serpent from Kazan’s coat of arms. The south building, the oldest in the ensemble, was erected as early as the first half of the 17th century. The north building, also from the 17th century, was rebuilt later and acquired a symmetrical Classical façade with a terrace at plinth level.

In the century after weapons production ceased, the buildings served in turn as officers’ housing for the Cadet School and as a soldiers’ canteen. In the 1990s the north building temporarily housed the residence of the President of Tatarstan, until a permanent residence for the republic’s leader was built in another part of the Kremlin — today it is a representative building of the presidential administration.

Restoration of all four buildings stretched across the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries: the east building was put in order in 1997–2004, the north in 1997–1999, and the south, restored by 2005 with its 17th-century appearance recreated, was given over to a museum of the history of the Kazan Kremlin. This made the Cannon Yard a rare example of an industrial building from the pre-Petrine and Petrine eras, incorporated into the museum route on equal footing with palaces and cathedrals.

No working workshops remain from the weapons production, but the very layout of the quadrangle around the former foundry yard, and the Baroque decoration of the east building, still recall the military-industrial past of the Kazan Kremlin — a past rarely mentioned amid its more ceremonial ensembles.