Kazan's rebuilt house of Tatar writers Kavi Najmi and Abdulla Alish: a monument and a fairy-tale playground proposed

The «Mergasov House» at 18 Dzerzhinsky Street in Kazan was built in 1928 as one of the first multi-storey residential buildings of Soviet Kazan. It is officially registered as the home of the Tatar writers Kavi Najmi (1931-1952) and Abdulla Alish (1938-1941). The building was declared unsafe in 2002, and the Tatarstan heritage committee says the dangerous parts must be taken down and the house rebuilt on its historic site.

On 10 November, Najmi's granddaughter Farida Nezhmetdinova, Alish's grandson Timur Alishev, architects, heritage specialists and Rahim Arslanov, director of Gymnasium No. 20, which bears Alish's name, discussed how to keep the memory of the house alive. Nezhmetdinova proposed a sculpture telling the story of Najmi and his wife Sarvar Adgamova, to stand at the top of the stairs towards the Black Lake park, opposite the «Arch of Lovers». The idea is more than 15 years old, and sculptor Igor Bashmakov once prepared sketches.

Arslanov suggested a children's playground with characters from Alish's tales in the yard, and paths inscribed with quotations from his stories. Architect Sergey Sanachin asked for a study of archive plans and old photographs and a search of the Writers' Union records for the original memorial plaques. Committee chair Ivan Gushchin said commemoration should not be reduced to restoring apartment addresses and warned against overloading the site with memorials. Whether the yard will be open to the public and what the final design will be are still undecided.