Thursday, December 14, 2006

An Awl in My Ass (Travel Photos!!) - 12/14/06

So, this weekend, I took a quick trip with a couple friends to Kazan', a city of about 1.1 million people four or five hundred kilometers north of here. My friends I all took the overnight train Friday evening, leaving us in Kazan' Saturday morning at around 6 in the morning. We began our day there with a sleepy walk down the street lamp-lined canal that runs down the middle of the old town, draining Canal's lake into the nearby Volga.


Kazan' is the capital of Tatarstan, one of Russia's "autonomous" ethnic republics. They are something like a cross between a Native American reservation (in that they enjoy relative autonomy under federal jurisdiction) and a state (they are generally the size of states and are rarely contained within other regions). Tatarstan is home to the majority of Russia's Tatar population (you may have heard of steak tartare or tartar sauce -- tartar sauce was invented in France to be served with steak tartare which supposedly comes from the Tatars). The Tatars are an ancient Sunni Muslim ethnic group that dates back the Turkic Ural-Altayans of Southern Siberia and Central Asia that were brought Westward by the Mongol invasion of the 13th Century (thank you Wikipedia!). Their traditional Muslim culture was somewhat supressed in the Soviet era and is now experiencing a revival. In that vein, the city of Kazan' has invested a great deal of money into rebuilding the Kul Sharif mosque (pictured below), which was destroyed by Ivan the terrible upon his defeat of the Kazan Khanate (a medieval Tatar state).


Kul Sharif is the largest mosque in Russia and, supposedly, also in Europe [Look at the tiny little people to the right of the picture below]. I can also tell you from experience [pictured above] that it is too heavy to lift.

The mosqe is contained within the walls of the city's kreml' (the word Russian word kreml' or kremlin as we say in English actually just translates to fortress), which was built in the 16th century on the ruins of the Kazan Khanate's own fortress

The walls have all been rebuilt since the 16th century, of course, but it is still a beautiful site to see, looking out over the Volga.

In addition to the kremlin and the mosque, we saw the city's main pedestrian drag, which is all being refurbished and developed. This town is a happening place.

They even have a new Basket-Kholl (Basket Hall, it is a play on words, both of which are merely transliterations from the English). Kazan's team is called the Unics. I could not for the life of me figure out how they got that name and my Russian friends couldn't explain it to me.

Other highlights of the day include a tiny nationalist demonstration...

...and car tires being sold through a wheel shaped hole in the wall.

Kazan' is a beautiful city. I really recommend going there to anyone who might visit Russia. The beauty of the city, the fun of traveling (even if to a place to which I've been before), and especially the fascinating intersection of Russian/Soviet culture and Sunni Muslim culture [see right] all gave me a strong urge to travel more. There was a museum in the first floor of the mosque on worldwide Islam that had beautiful pictures of the ancient mosques in Samarkand and Bukhara Uzbekistan. By the end of the trip, I had made up my mind: in April, I'm going to take a trip to central Asia and see those mosques for myself.

On the train back to Samara, I told my Russian friends that I had the travel bug, and tried to explain what it was, without knowing the Russian word for bug. It got through to them, though, and they told me the Russian equivalent of the term: in Russian, I would say I have a shylo v popke (an awl in my ass). Meaning, I can't sit down. I'm now entertaining myself by planning my upcoming trip to Siberia/Mongolia and the springtime daydream in the Kyrgyz Republic and Uzbekistan, and probably Glorious Nation Kazakhstan too.

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1 Comments:

Blogger americanka said...

Kazan looks gorgeous! I wanna be in Russia again, I guess I've got an awl in my ass too. Your last post about the Tadjik guy was pretty inspiring in that not-really-inspiring bleak Russian way we both know so well. Keep it up.

9:58 AM  

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