The Museum of History of Kazan University

Since 1978, the museum of Kazan Federal University (KFU) has occupied a room that, over the course of the past century, has served a range of unique purposes. At one time the Church of the Holy Cross, where the funeral of university rector Nikolai Lobachevsky took place, occupied the room. Later it was home to a gym and then the university library’s Rare Literature Reading Room before being entrusted to museum staff.

The museum has excellent acoustics and thus has occasionally hosted concerts of Pritcha (Apologue), the vocal quartet from Raif Monastery, as well as various scientific conferences.

In addition to the main hall, museum staff takes care of the main university auditorium and the seventh classroom of the law faculty, where Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin attended lectures on the history of Russian law.

The museum collection has over 1,500 exhibits, including, for example, the official charter signed by Alexander I authorizing the creation of Kazan Imperial University.

Museum guests can also stop by the Lobachevsky Corner, a table lined with the mathematician’s original publications on non-Euclidean geometry, as well as his personal belongings, including a grandfather clock that to this day still accurately keeps time. The museum has on display Russia’s first aspirin and salicylic acid compounds, which were produced in Kazan at the factory of the merchant and industrialist Krestovnikov brothers, who during World War I founded the present-day Nafis Kazan Chemical Plant. Also on exhibit are Samoilov’s string galvanometer, which recorded the first electrocardiogram in Russia; Vishnevsky’s surgical instruments; and the chemist Arbuzov’s glass-blowing device.

Guests of the museum can browse artifacts that Kazan University scholars brought back with them from expeditions to all corners of the world, as well as hundreds of other interesting discoveries related to Kazan University.