The Kazan Cathedral Mosque Incident: On the History of One Architectural Project

Abstract

The building of the Kazan Cathedral Mosque is still a promising architectural project, but it already has its own history, which includes the 2022 international sketch competition, held within the anniversary of the adoption of Islam in the Volga region, the struggle for the preservation of the Kyrlay park, where the foundation stone was laid, the decision to move the construction site, the introduction of new projects out‐of‐competition in 2023, and the discussion of one of such projects, unexpectedly “announced approved by the authorities”, with the Muslim religious leaders of Tatarstan... The protracted design of such an iconic object allows evaluating the starting points, the development direction, and problems of modern mosque architecture in Russia, the searches for the image of a religious building and the options to combine the traditional and the modern in Muslim architecture. The fate of the Kazan Cathedral Mosque is comparable to the “Kocatepe mosque incident” — the construction of the Ankara Cathedral Mosque, which for decades consolidated the neo‐Ottoman trend in Muslim architecture. The project owners of the Kazan mosque declared rejection of the tiresome adapted neo‐Ottoman model, which substituted the search for truly national forms. However, architectural bureaus are not yet ready to propose projects that would equally satisfy the requirements for the preservation of the traditional and the compliance with the trends of modern architecture, and often replace creative searches with combinations of quotations of famous monuments or elements of earlier competition projects.

Keywords

• modern mosque
• architectural competitions
• design
• “kocatepe incident”
• kazan cathedral mosque
• tatar style
• aquatheologeme