Bauman Street, Epiphany Bell Tower and Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral

Stretching nearly two kilometres from the southern foot of the Kazan Kremlin at 1 May Square to the commercial hub of Tukay Square, pedestrian Bauman Street (Ulitsa Baumana) is the oldest and liveliest thoroughfare in central Kazan. Paved with multicoloured bricks and lined with linden trees, cast-iron street lanterns, fountains, and nineteenth-century merchant arcades, the street together with parallel Musa Cälil and Kremlyovskaya streets forms the spine of the historic upper city.

From the Nogai Road to Bolshaya Prolomnaya and Bauman Street

During the era of the Khanate of Kazan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the route followed the ancient Nogai Road leading south from the Khan's fortress. After Russian sappers detonated gunpowder mines beneath the Nur-Ali tower and the Lower Nogai Gate during Ivan the Terrible's siege in October 1552, the street was renamed Prolomnaya (literally Breach Street) and later Bolshaya Prolomnaya (Greater Breach Street, while neighbouring Profsoyuznaya Street became Malaya Prolomnaya, or Lesser Breach Street) in memory of the two breaches blasted through the citadel wall. In the eighteenth century it was also called Bogoyavlenskaya after the Epiphany Church, and by 1900 a retail shop, bank, pharmacy, or printing house occupied every ground-floor facade along its length. In 1930 the avenue was given its present name in honour of Kazan-born revolutionary Nikolay Bauman (1873 to 1905), who graduated from the Kazan Veterinary Institute, and today it is a car-free pedestrian street.

The Epiphany Bell Tower, Fyodor Chaliapin and the Kazan Cat

Halfway along Bauman Street rises its unmistakable vertical landmark, the 74-metre red-brick bell tower of the Epiphany Cathedral (Bogoyavlensky Sobor). While the pastel-blue stone Church of the Epiphany behind it was built between 1731 and 1756 through donations from merchants Ivan Mikhlyaev and Sergey Chernov, the towering Russian Revival belfry directly over the pavement was constructed at the end of the nineteenth century after first-guild merchant and bank director Ivan Semyonovich Krivonosov (1810 to 1892) left money in his will for a new bell tower. Visitors can climb the internal brick staircase to the upper belfry arcade for a panoramic view along Bauman Street toward the Kremlin. At the base of the church stands a 1999 bronze statue of Russian opera bass Fyodor Chaliapin (1873 to 1938), who was born nearby and baptised inside the Epiphany Church, alongside the restored 1860s and 1910 commercial building now operating as the Shalyapin Palace Hotel. A few blocks north, walkers pass the bronze replica of Catherine the Great's state carriage, the Zero Kilometre meridian stone, the 2003 Alley of Tatar Stars honouring singers Älfiyä Avzalova and Ilham Şakirov, and the rotund cast-aluminum monument to the Cat of Kazan (Alabrys), commemorating the thirty mouse-catching cats dispatched from Kazan to Empress Elizabeth Petrovna's Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg in 1745.

Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral on Musa Cälil Street

One short block uphill from Bauman Street at 21 Musa Cälil Street stands Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral (Petropavlovsky Sobor), one of the finest examples of Naryshkin Baroque architecture in Russia. In 1722 Tsar Peter the Great celebrated his fiftieth birthday in Kazan on his way to the Persian campaign and stayed at the stone house of textile manufacturer Ivan Afanasievich Mikhlyaev alongside the cathedral site. Out of gratitude, Mikhlyaev commissioned master builders and carvers from Moscow and Kazan to replace the small parish church with a monumental two-storey cathedral consecrated in 1726 in honour of the Tsar's heavenly patrons. Rising beside a six-tiered octagonal bell tower that holds the tombs of the Mikhlyaev and Dryablov merchant families, the exterior facades are covered in richly painted relief carvings of grapevines, plums, peaches, and floral rosettes that survived the devastating Kazan fires of 1742, 1749, 1774, and 1815, while the upper sanctuary preserves its soaring seven-tiered gilded baroque iconostasis.