Kazan Icon Museum
Tatarstan
Contact information
Operating hours
Daily from 9:00 – 20:00
Ticket price
Full price – 250 rubles
Special rate – 150 rubles
Audio guide – 100 rubles
The founder of the museum
Valery Yuryevich Sorokin
The museum Director
Elena Bryl
Founded
2019
The Kazan Icon Museum is a one of a kind must-visit place for visitors and residents of the city of Kazan. This is a museum that houses icon-painting masterpieces painted in gold more than 100 years ago in the workshop of the Kazan Bogoroditsky monastery, one of the oldest and most famous in the Middle Volga region.
The museum is located next to the Kazan Kremlin in the immediate vicinity of the Kazan Bogoroditsky monastery, in the house of the Kazan mayor of the early 19th century, recreated according to the drawings of the 1840s; that is, it is on the site associated with the history of the miraculous Kazan icon and other events of Kazan’s history.
The museum displays the Kazan icons of the Holy Mother, painted in “measure and likeness to the revealed icon of the Blessed Virgin of Kazan”; this is how the nuns signed the icons of their work, the prototype of which was the main Kazan relic. Thanks to them, today we can imagine what the icon found in the conflagration in 1579 looked like at the end of the 19th century.
In the museum you can see the lists made in the monastery workshop of various icons that are miraculous and revered in the Kazan diocese. Each of them is associated with some real episode from the history of the vast Kazan region, be it a miraculous escape from the plague or deliverance from the dashing army of Stenka Razin.
The museum’s collection contains exhibits that have important cultural and historical significance; these are icons painted by nuns, related to famous events or persons, that were specially ordered and gifted for certain dates. The geography of such gifts was not limited to the boundaries of the Kazan province and reached the capitals of the Russian Empire.
The Kazan Icon Museum is equipped with modern museum and multimedia equipment that allows anyone willing to independently organize their own excursion. You can simply be alone with the icons or get to know each exhibit in detail, learn more about the history of the city of Kazan, the Kazan Bogoroditsky monastery, and its icon painting workshop.
