Arriving in Russia
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.
06.26.2008
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