The Prison Castle

The Prison Castle on Yapeeva Street is one of the few architectural complexes in Kazan to have preserved almost unchanged the appearance of a provincial prison department of the century before last. This federally protected landmark was built as a civilian prison — unlike the military prison castle erected later, in 1833–1834, within the walls of the Kazan Kremlin.

The castle was built in 1807 with funds from the state treasury. From the outset the complex included not only cell blocks for prisoners but also a prison hospital and its own church, as well as an administrative building, a kitchen, a bakery, a dining hall, and guard buildings. Originally designed to hold 250 people, the prison was enclosed by a wall with four fortified towers — a rare example, for Kazan’s civil architecture, of a self-contained, closed-type ensemble.

The main and northwestern buildings, together with the other structures, have preserved the appearance they acquired back in the 19th century and today require large-scale capital repairs. Brick was the principal building material, and the austere architecture, free of excessive decoration, fully matched the complex’s utilitarian purpose.

The most notable event in the castle’s history was the visit of Emperor Nicholas I on 20 August 1836, when the prison held about 300 people; the provincial prosecutor Gavriil Solntsev impressed the emperor with his remarkable memory. One of the prisoners, Pyotr Zamyatin from Kozmodemyansk, convicted of embezzlement, asked the emperor to have him assigned to military service — and received a personal order from Nicholas I to have him enlisted as a soldier. Modest sums were allotted for feeding the inmates: 10 kopecks a day in 1817 and 12 kopecks in 1820, with meat appearing in the diet only on holidays, which led prisoners to constantly complain of meagre food. In 1823 three inmates escaped through a window and across the roof, having tied together a makeshift rope from canvas.

In the Soviet period, and up until recent years, the complex continued to be used for its original purpose: from 1982 to 1990 it housed pre-trial detention centre No. 1, where suspects were interrogated. After SIZO No. 1 moved to a new building on Gudovantseva Street, designed to hold a thousand inmates, it was decided to hand the historic site over for restoration — plans call for reinforcing the roofing, walls, and foundations of the surviving buildings.

The Prison Castle remains a rare monument of penitentiary architecture in Kazan, one that in two centuries of continuous operation witnessed both an imperial visit and the fates of thousands of prisoners. Its massive walls are not only a page in the region’s judicial history but also a reminder of how Russia’s penal system changed over two centuries.