Arriving in Russia - David Turner (17/06/2008)

My first visit to Russia was special. I didn't visit St Petersburg or Moscow; not even the beautiful lake Baikal. No, my first taste of Russia was the lesser-known city of Kazan sitting at the east of Europe in Tatarstan where the river Kazanka joins the mighty Volga.

Kazan recently celebrated its 1000th anniversary and during those thousand years it has seen many changes. In the middle ages it was the capital city of the Tatars of the Golden Horde, the equal of Samarkand and Bokara for its beauty and culture, but this wealth and power attracted absolute destruction in 1552 by Tsar Ivan the Terrible. The Tatars remained, and Kazan today is an exotic mixture of East and West where mosques and orthodox churches sit peacefully side by side.

I didn't know what to expect as my train creaked out of the Kazan Station in Moscow. The journey was 12 hours overnight and as dawn broke over the countryside of rural Tatarstan the view was of field after field of crops. As the train approached the city, the farmland gave way to more and more small villages, often with a tiny station to serve holidaymakers visiting their dachas. All at once the train surged forward onto the impossibly narrow steel bridge over the Volga and there before me lay the walled Kremlin of Kazan, dazzling white walls gleaming in the early morning sun. The minarets of the cathedral and the mosque towered over the citadel and as the train squealed to a halt I was filled with the sense of excitement that all travelers feel when they arrive somewhere exotic and new.