Kazan's culture runs on two languages at once: Tatar poets and Russian avant-gardists, an opera house that hosts the Chaliapin and Nureyev festivals, and Feshin portraits hung in a general's mansion. Three days of galleries, theatres and the wooden Old Tatar Quarter.
Merchant Ivan Mikhlyaev raised this 52m Naryshkin-baroque cathedral in 1723 after Peter I lodged in his house next door. The pink-and-white tiered facade is unlike anything else on the Volga; Kremlyovskaya Street then runs past 19th-century mansions.
The Fine Arts Museum's modern wing, three floors of Tatarstan painting: Baki Urmanche's fusion of Tatar ornament with Soviet modernism, post-war Kazan graphics and rotating shows by artists in their thirties. Labels are Russian-only.
General Sandetsky's 1906 mansion holds the Nicholas Feshin collection — the Kazan-born portraitist who emigrated to Taos, New Mexico in 1923 — alongside Shishkin landscapes and Tatar jewellery. Open 10:00-18:00, closed Mondays.
Korinfsky's 1825 colonnade, where Nikolai Lobachevsky worked out non-Euclidean geometry and both Tolstoy and Lenin were students. The courtyard keeps the anatomical theatre, the old observatory and the seated Lobachevsky monument.
The colonnaded 1956 theatre on Freedom Square runs the Chaliapin Opera Festival each February and the Nureyev Ballet Festival in May. Daytime entry is by guided backstage tour; evening tickets start low by European standards.
The two rooms where the Tatar poet lived until 1941, kept as they were. Jalil was executed at Plötzensee in 1944; the Moabit Notebooks he smuggled out of the Berlin prison are the reason his name is on half the streets in Tatarstan.
Housed in the 1770s Gostiny Dvor trading rows, with 800,000 items: Volga Bulgar silver, the gilded carriage of Catherine II from her 1767 visit, and Kazan Khanate weaponry from before the 1552 siege.
Tatarstan's national theatre on the shore of Lower Kaban, its 1986 building shaped like a folded sail. Performances are in Tatar with simultaneous Russian translation through headsets handed out free at the cloakroom.
Built 1766-1770, the first stone mosque permitted in Kazan after Catherine II lifted the 200-year ban. Named for the historian Shihabuddin Marjani who served here; around it run the pastel wooden merchant houses of Kayum Nasyri Street.
A Moorish-turreted 1863 mansion given by merchant Apakov to a son of Imam Shamil, now the museum of the poet who effectively made modern literary Tatar. Manuscripts, his tiny hotel-room desk, and the 1913 death mask.
A converted warehouse on Burhana Shahidi that is the engine of Kazan's independent scene: exhibitions, an excellent art-book shop, lectures, and the twice-yearly Smena book fair that pulls small publishers from across Russia.
The 2018 promenade by a Russian-Chinese-Japanese design team, with terraced steps into the reeds, floating platforms and evening projections. Locals swim, fish and rehearse here; the Kamal Theatre sits at the far end.