Ekiyat Puppet Theatre

Ekiyat is the name of Kazan’s puppet theatre, one of the largest and oldest in the country, which has held academic status since 2024. The company is based in Kazan’s Vakhitovsky District, on Peterburgskaya Street, in a building shaped like a fairy-tale castle. The theatre’s name comes from the Tatar word “äkiyat,” meaning “fairy tale,” and the building’s entire design follows this theme: from a distance one can already see its multicoloured turrets, twisted columns and figures of fairy-tale characters on the façade.

The company’s history began in August 1934, when Kazan’s first state-status international puppet theatre opened, drawing together several separate amateur groups. For the previous two years, amateur Tatar and Russian puppet troupes had operated at the Central Pioneers’ House, and their members formed the core of the new company under the direction of Sergei Merzlyakov. In 1937 the theatre turned for the first time to national material, staging Gabdulla Tukay’s fairy tale “Käzhä belän saryk” (“The Goat and the Ram”) in an adaptation by actors Rokyya Khabibullina and Fuat Tagirov. Over the following decades the company was led by directors Salyakhetdin Khusnutdinov, Igor Moskalyov, Boris Rychkov, Rabit Batullin, and Ildus Zinnurov, who headed the theatre for more than forty years.

For a long time the theatre had no building of its own: on 10 March 1959 the company was given premises on Lukovsky Street, and later it spent several decades based in the building of a former church, the Descent of the Holy Spirit. Construction of the current building began with the laying of a foundation stone on 3 October 2008, to a design by architect Svetlana Mamleyeva. The building’s Eastern-inflected appearance, with its towers, stained glass and moulded figures, was conceived so that the sense of entering a fairy tale would begin even on the approach to the theatre.

The new building was formally opened on 1 March 2012, with Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov, State Counsellor Mintimer Shaymiev and other republic leaders in attendance. The complex covers more than twenty-two thousand square metres, and the project cost around 1.3 billion rubles. The theatre gained two auditoriums — a main hall seating two hundred and fifty and a smaller one seating a hundred — and in April 2014 the theatre opened its own museum.

Since 1974 Ekiyat has been a member of UNIMA, the International Union of Puppetry, and regularly takes part in festivals abroad, from Germany and France to Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. The company performs in both Russian and Tatar with simultaneous interpretation, and its repertoire combines classic fairy tales, contemporary drama and productions aimed at adult audiences. In 2024 the production “The Aviator,” based on the novel by Yevgeny Vodolazkin, brought the theatre three National Theatre “Golden Mask” awards at once, and on 15 October that year the institution was granted the honorary status of an academic theatre.

Today Ekiyat is one of Kazan’s recognisable landmarks: the silhouette of the building on Peterburgskaya Street has become a city orientation point, and the theatre itself is a venue where young audiences, adult theatregoers and national-level recognition all come together.