Guardhouse Building

OBJECT DESCRIPTION

The Guardhouse is the place for stationing the guards who watch over the Kazan Kremlin. Later, this location started housing detained military people.

The Guardhouse Building was built in the middle of the 19th century in the south-eastern part of the Kazan Kremlin. The L-shaped building has three floors, strict, smoothly plastered facades without decorative details, rectangular windows with a simple cornice, and a low-pitched roof.

The building slightly deviates from the curtain wall between the Yugo-Vostochnaya (Southeast) and Konsistorskaya (Consistory) towers on the east, and it adjoins the Kremlin wall’s curtain wall on the south side between the Spasskaya (Saviour) and Yugo-Vostochnaya (Southeast) towers.

In August 1917, the White Guards used this tower as a prison. Y.S. Sheinkman, M. Vakhitov, S.N. Gassar, M.I. Mezhlauk, and many others had been imprisoned here and subsequently shot at the Kremlin wall.

In 1998 and 2003, the building underwent restoration and renovation.

The Guardhouse Building is currently manned by a police battalion.