Main Post Office Building (2 structures)

The building of the Kazan Main Post Office occupies an entire corner block on Kremlyovskaya Street, house 8, just steps from 1 May Square and the walls of Kazan Kremlin. In the register of cultural heritage sites the complex is listed as two structures, because the building has three storeys on the Kremlyovskaya Street side, while on the side of Rakhmatullin Street, where its rear facade faces, it has four — the difference is due to the slope of the terrain.

The building was constructed in 1910–1911 to a design by architect V. A. Trofimov with the participation of P. F. Gavrilov, as an apartment building for the Sapozhnikov merchant family of Kazan. In plan the building is U-shaped and covers almost the entire block — a scale rarely seen for a private apartment building in pre-revolutionary Kazan. By 1913 the property owner on record was Serafima Sapozhnikova, widow of a hereditary honorary citizen, while the family itself occupied the bel étage: the spacious second-floor rooms with windows facing the street were traditionally considered the most prestigious in apartment buildings of this type.

The ground floor on the Kremlyovskaya Street side was leased out for shops: it housed a hardware and chemical goods store run by the merchant Konstantin Sapozhnikov, the Gelman pharmacy, and Yegor Ginkel’s gun shop, famous throughout the city. The upper floor was initially rented by a gymnasium, and during the First World War the premises were converted into a hospital for the wounded. The building’s facades are executed in neoclassical forms with Art Nouveau elements: the main entrance is emphasised by a pair of Doric columns and a massive cornice, while the strict rhythm of the window openings underscores the building’s length along the entire block.

During the Civil War the building briefly housed the editorial office of the newspaper “Znamya Revolyutsii” (“Banner of the Revolution”), and soon afterwards the former apartment building was handed over to the city’s main post and telegraph office. Thus a private commercial building became a state communications institution, while retaining the pre-revolutionary appearance of its facades.

Today the building is still occupied by the Kazan Main Post Office, and the structure remains protected as an architectural monument of the early 20th century. Located on the city’s main historic street, it stands alongside other merchant mansions and trading arcades of the same period, together forming the cohesive appearance of pre-revolutionary Kremlyovskaya Street.

From an apartment building of fur-trading merchants to the editorial office of a revolutionary newspaper and a state post office — the history of this building recapitulates, in miniature, the path the whole street has followed over the past century: private commerce gave way to Soviet-era state institutions, yet the architectural character of the place has remained recognisable.