Mosques are an integral attribute, so to speak, of the life of every Muslim regardless of his or her nationality and citizenship. A mosque is not only a place for praying, but also an opportunity to meet with fellow believers, to be alone with your own thoughts, to turn to the Almighty and simply to hide from everyday life.
And today we offer you to get acquainted with peculiarities of Tatar mosques that not only distinguish them from religious buildings erected by other Muslim peoples, but also make them unique by nature.
1. All the mosques in Kazan are located at an angle to the street red lines
This is due to the fact that the Kaaba for Kazan is slightly angled. Besides, the mosque building on the Tatar land is not oriented across the qibla, as is done just to the south, but along it to isolate worshippers from the entrance.
2. The location of the minaret
Another peculiarity of Tatar mosque architecture is the location of the minaret on the roof. All mosques in Kazan are located on a slight elevation: when there is a ravine nearby, when the religious building is on the hill, towering above the neighboring buildings. All this was done to make the mosque visible from all sides. During Soviet times, for instance, the Zakabannaya mosque was surrounded by high-rise buildings so that it could not be seen from the other side.
3. Mosques for Tatar Muslims were often built by non-Muslim architects, which affected the architectural style
Architect Peter Romanov used elements of medieval Tatar, Russian and oriental architecture in the decoration of the Burnayev mosque. It was built in the eclectic style, based on a mixture of classical techniques. Such quirkiness of design was characteristic for mosques of those times, built in accordance with designs by non-Muslim architects. The minaret vaguely resembles the bell tower of the Epiphany Cathedral, whiles the decoration, on the contrary, was inspired by national ornaments.
4. Kazan mosques were erected in business districts of the city
For instance, there used to be an old wooden Muslim temple for workers in the soap industry on the site of the Azimov mosque. In 1851, Mustafa Azimov, one of the wealthiest merchants of the parish, replaced it by a new wooden mosque with a minaret. In 1887, Murtaza Azimov, his son, built a stone and more spacious building.
And in the middle of the once oriental-like noisy Sennoy Bazaar, one of the largest stone mosques in Kazan of the XIX century, Sennaya, also known as Bazarnaya mosque, was built. Now it is known as the Nurulla mosque.
At the bazaar, the heart of social life, where Muslims from all the neighboring villages gathered early in the morning in order to trade, learn the latest news and discuss important matters, a mosque was essential: the Tatars needed a convenient place to perform their daily prayers.
5. Mosques represented the boundary and social centre of the Tatar part of the city
6. Each of the minarets of individual mosques bears not only memories of the ancient Tatar architectural tradition, but also of ancient monuments of the rich Muslim civilization
According to Niyaz Khalita, an architect who has studied the history and appearance of Tatar mosques around the world, each of the minarets bears memories of the ancient Tatar architectural tradition, recalling the stone towers of medieval Bulgar (Iske Tash mosque) and ancient wooden towers that have become symbols of Islam in this land (Galeevskaya and Blue mosques) for a thousand years.
Twenty years later another minaret, topped with a high gilded tent, emerged at the northern boundary of the Tatar city. Its heavy forms evoked associations with defensive and watchtowers, as if to remind us that the border ran there.
7. Construction of each mosque is usually associated with an ancient legend
The favourite here is probably the Kul Sharif mosque, the towers of which rise above its ancient citadel – the Kremlin, where centuries ago the ancient minarets were crumbling. The image of the mosque with its minarets, reborn on the ancient land of Tatarstan, shows a connection with distant ancestors, and each of the mosques fascinates the eye, has its own long and full of unusual twists and turns history.
Perhaps the oldest mosque in the capital of Tatarstan is the Al Marjani mosque, located in the Old Tatar Sloboda. This mosque has a symbolic meaning for all Muslims of the Volga region and Tatarstan. The Al Marjani mosque is the first stone mosque built in Kazan after the capture of the city by Ivan the Terrible. It was opened in 1770 by the personal permission of Catherine II and was never closed since then. The mosque continued to function even during the years of revolution and war.
The Iske Tash mosque is a historical Muslim religious building in the city of Kazan. According to an old legend, the mosque was erected on the site of the mass grave of soldiers who defended Kazan from the troops of Ivan the Terrible in the bloody year 1552. The grave was marked by a large old stone, which was preserved and located in front of the mosque’s eastern façade.
8. The first Tatar mosques were wooden
After the development of the Old Tatar Sloboda, the Tatar population started to settle in the adjacent territories. This is how the New Tatar Sloboda emerged. Unlike the Old Tatar Sloboda, which was the centre of Tatar culture, intelligentsia and merchants, the New Sloboda was inhabited by ordinary Tatar workers and craftsmen. Simple and small wooden houses and mosques were built in the New Tatar Sloboda. Later two large stone mosques were erected, one of which (Iske Tash) became the social centre of the Sloboda.
9. The formation of two main branches of Tatar religious architecture: the progressive urban and the orthodox rural ones
Brigades of professional architects, well aware of the traditional techniques and means, erected buildings to their own taste, which had little in common with the refined taste of the provincial architects, brought up on different patterns and aesthetic ideals. The result of all this activity was Tatar religious Islamic architecture of new time, the two branches of which – urban (professional) and rural (folk) – were in constant interaction, creating more and more new forms of ancient Bulgarian tradition in new conditions.
As Niyaz Khalitov notes, the diversity of forms and vitality of peculiar manifestations of national style were not accompanied by sufficiently high level of construction skill, scale of design or search for daring engineering solutions. The provincial status of all urban centres of Tatar culture and initially legal restrictions on the size, number and dominance of mosque architecture in the conditions of the colonial empire inevitably led to the impossibility of serious progress.
Only at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries the situation began to change radically: the state did not interfere in the micromanagement of all processes of architecture and structure development, and the fate of architecture began to depend only on creative forces and funds invested in the implementation of certain ideas.
It was at this time that Tatar architecture began to stand out for its bright polychromy, and the striped coloring of planked surfaces was getting increasingly popular, which became a distinctive feature of Tatar architecture unlike that of Russian and Finno-Ugric architecture.
10. Most mosques built in Kazan were cathedral ones
It is worth mentioning the fact that the Tatars have had several types of mosques since ancient times.
1. ‘Al Masjid’ – a mahallah mosque, which was the centre of the parish, where the daily fivefold namaz was performed.
2. ‘Al Jami’ – a mosque, where solemn Friday prayers were performed. They could be of different number, depending on the size of a settlement. Such mosques were usually erected next to public places, crowded squares and public trading centres.
3. ‘Al Jami Al Kabir’ – the main mosques of the city, which stood out for their size and monumentality of forms.
4. In large cities there were musallas – out-of-town mosques for prayers on annual festivals with large crowds. Such mosques were a vast walled square, but roofed buildings were not necessary.
Besides, there were other specialized mosques, which fulfilled various social needs: memorials, khanaka mosques and others. All these kinds of mosques, which accompanied Islamic cities, undoubtedly existed in medieval architecture of the Volga region: in Volga Bulgaria and in the Kazan Khanate.
It is noteworthy that the majority of Tatar mosques were built as cathedral ones. ‘First Cathedral’, ‘Starokamennaya’, ‘Yunusovskaya’, ‘Al Marjani’ – they are all different names for the same Muslim religious building, one of the most ancient mosques in the city, built after the conquest of the Kazan Khanate.
11. Tatar architecture has the obvious predominance of fine plastics over coarse plastics and of color over plastics in general
In Tatar architecture, like in Islamic architecture, the language of supergraphics, abstract geometric design and certain color combinations blossoms brightly. Its peculiarity is the visual destruction of façade plane and the creation of an independent architectural image on cloudy days, when its plastic characteristics are blurred.
There is a legend that such mosques first appeared as a result of construction activities of Franciscan missionaries in the XII century. Architecture retains memories of the ancient Khazar Muslims, who migrated there in the VIII century, of great culture of the Golden Horde and the Kazan Khanate that were close friends with the Mamluks of Egypt, the Seljuks and the Ottomans; it also retains traces of contact with western styles during the reign of Russian Tsars. The complex history of the Bulgarian-Tatar architecture, its prosperity, decline and struggle for existence in subsequent centuries can be read in the minarets’ fractures and the outlines of the tent.
Ilmira Gafiyatullina
Photo: Creative Commons