Mosque of Kazan
 During so many years of Islamic culture in the Mid-Volga region, in the territory of Tatarstan Moslem cult architecture had its periods of flowering and sinking into oblivion.
The monuments of Moslem cult architecture of the period of Kazan khanate has not been preserved. There is only written evidence telling about the mosques of Kazan "Nur-Ali", "Khanskaya", "the Otuchev mosque", and "Kul-Sharif" which were demolished together with hundreds of other village mosques by the Russian troops during the conquest. Till the end of the 18th century Islam had been prosecuted which led tocomplete disappearance of Islamic architecture in the region.
 Only in the reign of Ekaterina II religious policy of autocracy concerning the Moslems of Russia was changed, and in the second part of the 18th century brick mosques were built. The mosques of Mardzhani and Apanaev were built in baroque and in the architectural style of Tatar decorative art.
At the end of the 18th - the first part of the 19th centuries the mosques were erected in strict forms of classicism. The "Galeev mosque", "Iske Tash", ¹11, the Blue mosque are of this type.
 In 1844 there appeared a new sample project of Tatar mosques with a central dome and ajoining minaret. According to this project the Sultan, Kazakov, Azimov mosques were built in the second part of the 19th century.
At the end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th century a new "modernistic" style became wide-spread. The Transkaban Mosque built in 1924 is one of the examples of this style.In Kazan it was the last mosque which finished the pre-revolutionary period of the development of Tatar cult architecture.
Since the 1980s the construction of new mosques has begun. Architects tried to create a new image of a Tatar mosque, reflecting the motifs of Eastern-Moslem, Bulgarian architecture (the mosques "Khuzaifa Ibn al-Yamani", "Ramazan", "Kazan Nuri", "Medina", etc). Some innovatory tendencies were observed in the projects of the mosques, one of them was the appearance of women's praying room. The functions of mosques were broadened. The buildings of mosques also included lavatory-cum-athrooms, rooms for ablution, relaxation rooms, libraries, clasrooms with praying rooms for students.
 A tendency to add plastic expressiveness to buildings using some historical elements was embodied in the Kul Sharif mosque which is being built in Kazan. A new and considerably higher level of architectiral composition can be observed in the project of the mosque. The rebirth of a style of a capital mosque with many minarets shows that a modern original Moslem cult architecture has appeared in Kazan.
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