When James Bond headed to Kazan in Russia, towards the end of Quantum of Solace, many people would have had but one thought: ‘Er…where?’

It’s a thought I shared before setting off to see what this provincial Russian city – a would-be new player on the Russian tourism trail – had to offer.

Russia for most Brits has previously meant escorted tours of St Petersburg or perhaps a long weekend in Moscow, and whilst Kazan is a fairly established destination for its domestic market, it is now embarking on an ambitious drive towards international tourism.

Pay attention – here’s the geography…

Kazan is around 400 miles east of Moscow. Sadly, there are no direct flights, and you travel there via Kaliningrad – a strange little outpost of Russia that’s separated from the mainland and surrounded by Europe.

Here you have the pleasure of being shunted around a cowshed of an airport while low ranking officials bark at you for papers about every hundred yards. I’m assuming Bond, J. skipped this bit.

It’s hardly Kazan’s fault, though, and I arrived in Russia’s eighth biggest city with an open mind. My first trip to the country may not have the glamour of Moscow or the historical heft of St Petersburg, but it would at least be an authentic experience.

I didn’t need to be an international spy to suspect this – as the capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan has been a cultural hub for a thousand years.

And I’ll answer your first question about the Tartars straight away.

Friendly locals: A Tartar woman in Kazan

No, they didn’t invent the sauce. They did, however, exist as a tribe across large swathes of central and eastern Europe and Asia, and their influence in cities such as Kazan are obvious as soon as you arrive.

A Muslim people, Tartar cities have beautiful mosques – more of which later – and distinctive traditional architecture, kind of rugged yet ornate and colourful wooden houses, some of which I’d get to explore.

The mix of Russians and Tartars is ostensibly a peaceful one, and the influences cohabit the city harmoniously.

My first impression of Kazan was that it obviously had some wealth.

Oil reserves and a propensity for public spending and large architectural statements (almost all of them built to celebrate the city’s millennium in 2006) mean that much of the city looks spanking new, from the hulking hotels that stand out against the more prosaic residential buildings to the enormous hippodrome – about as technologically advanced a place as you’re going to get horses into.

My hotel – The Riviera – looked like it had been transplanted from Las Vegas, and was kind of needlessly over the top, but had nice designer touches and a lobby that must breach the top five glitziest lobbies in Russia.

All white: The historic Kazan Kremlin

The more interesting sites, though, were more than two years old. The Kazan Kremlin (kremlin just means ’citadel’ in Russian) is a World Heritage Site and boasts the striking five domes and six columns of the Annunciation Cathedral.

Next to it, as one cathedral is plainly never really enough, is the baroque St Peter and Paul cathedral.

Plain isn’t really a word that comes to mind at Russian Orthodox cathedrals – if there was gold leaf to be had, it was slapped on a wall somewhere and if you’re a fan of religious icons, then you’re in the right place as there’s more here than you could shake a thurible at.

Also in the complex is the biggest mosque in Europe, the Qol-Şärif mosque, which may suffer from Plain Jane syndrome next to the bling of the cathedrals, but is still impressive in its scale and as a sign of the harmonious co-existence of the religions here.

The city’s sights are pleasant enough – Bauman’s Street is the main commercial centre, and the Pyramid shopping centre is a good place to find retro-looking souvenirs.

Although the days of Communism are still apparent in some of the architecture, much progress is being made, and a new metro is just one of the projects that are slowly transforming the city.

Treat: Traditional Tartar food

Another telling sign of progress is the fact that most young people seem to dress all day like they’re at a nightclub, scarcity of material and thigh boots very much the order of even the coldest day.

The Tartar heritage is being conserved, though, especially through traditional restaurants where, under wooden roofs and with vodka flowing, you can chow down on some – very tasty – Tartar specialities.

For a native Lancastrian such as myself, the ‘belish’ (essentially a big, crusty pie) was heaven on a plate, while sweet-tooths would find it hard to resist the ‘chak-chak’, little domes of honey-sweetened dough balls.

The best way to truly get an insight into the Tartars is to head out to the settlements on the fringes of the city.

Visiting the Tartar villages can only really be done with a guide (easily arranged through the tourist office).

As the minbus shakes off the suburbs and the trappings of the city fall away, the landscape opens out into farmland, though high-heel thigh-length boots are still noticeably favoured by females under 45.

The houses become nearly all wooden – almost Alpine in appearance, but brightly coloured and with ornate flourishes.

As we get off the bus, a beaming gaggle of family members are there to welcome us into their home – at least three generations, all in traditional Tartar dress.

The villages are largely self-sufficient, and as well as milk fresh from the goats and honey straight form the hive, there’s a wealth of vegetables, cakes (chak-chak, of course) and – thank heavens – still-warm belish on a table that’s audibly groaning with the weight of the feast.

As we eat, our guide translates our questions and the questions that the Tartars have about the UK.

Many a glass is raised – the honey vodka and plum brandies knocked back purely out of politeness of course – and it’s a merry bunch we have by the time lunch is over and our hosts are playing us traditional music and singing haunting songs.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-1156543/A-taste-Tartar-Kazan-Russia.html#ixzz1l2QQWbkB

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Image by migrationmuseum via Flickr

Tatar, also spelled Tartar,  any member of several Turkic-speaking peoples that collectively numbered more than 5 million in the late 20th century and lived mainly in west-central Russia along the central course of the Volga River and its tributary, the Kama, and thence east to the Ural Mountains. The Tatars are also settled in Kazakhstan and, to a lesser extent, in western Siberia.

The name Tatar first appeared among nomadic tribes living in northeastern Mongolia and the area around Lake Baikal from the 5th century ad. Unlike the Mongols, these peoples spoke a Turkic language, and they may have been related to the Cuman or Kipchak peoples. After various groups of these Turkic nomads became part of the armies of the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan in the early 13th century, a fusion of Mongol and Turkic elements took place, and the Mongol invaders of Russia and Hungary became known to Europeans as Tatars (or Tartars).

After Genghis Khan’s empire broke up, the Tatars became especially identified with the western part of the Mongol domain, which included most of European Russia and was called the Golden Horde. These Tatars were converted to Sunnite Islām in the 14th century. Owing to internal divisions and various foreign pressures, the Golden Horde disintegrated late in the 14th century into the independent Tatar khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan on the Volga River, Sibir in western Siberia, and the Crimea. Russia conquered the first three of these khanates in the 16th century, but the Crimean khanate became a vassal state of the Ottoman Turks until it was annexed to Russia by Catherine the Great in 1783.

In their khanates the Tatars developed a complex social organization, and their nobility preserved its civil and military leadership into Russian times; distinct classes of commoners were merchants and tillers of the soil. At the head of government stood the khan of the foremost Tatar state (the Kazan khanate), part of whose family joined the Russian nobility by direct agreement in the 16th century. This stratification within Tatar society continued until the Russian Revolution of 1917.

During the 9th to 15th centuries, the Tatar economy became based on mixed farming and herding, which still continues. The Tatars also developed a tradition of craftsmanship in wood, ceramics, leather, cloth, and metal and have long been well known as traders. During the 18th and 19th centuries, they earned a favoured position within the expanding Russian Empire as commercial and political agents, teachers, and administrators of newly won Central Asian territories.

More than 1.5 million Kazan Tatars still live in the Volga and Urals regions, and they constitute about half the population within the republic of Tatarstan. They are now known as Volga Tatars and are the wealthiest and most industrially advanced of the Tatar groups. Almost a million more Tatars live in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, while the Siberian Tatars, numbering only about 100,000, live scattered over western Siberia.

The Crimean Tatars had their own history in the modern period. They formed the basis of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which was set up by the Soviet government in 1921. This republic was dissolved in 1945, however, when the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin accused the approximately 200,000 Crimean Tatars of having collaborated with the Germans during World War II. As a result, the Crimean Tatars were deported en masse to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where their use of the Tatar language was forbidden. They regained their civil rights in 1956 under the de-Stalinization program of Nikita Khrushchev, but they were not allowed to return to the Crimea, which had been incorporated into the Ukrainian S.S.R. in 1954. It was not until the early 1990s that many Crimean Tatars, taking advantage of the breakup of the Soviet central government’s authority, began returning to settle in the Crimea after nearly five decades of internal exile. They now number about 270,000.

taken from:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/584107/Tatar

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