Fifteen Arabic-script Tatar gravestones restored in Yelabuga, new "Muslim Yelabuga" tour opens

Fifteen gravestones carved in Arabic script have been restored at the Old Muslim Cemetery in Yelabuga, Tatarstan. The work was done under the "History Frozen in Stone" initiative with support from the Tatneft charitable foundation. The Yelabuga Museum-Reserve then built a bus-and-walking route called "Muslim Yelabuga" and has run four trial tours so far.

The route begins with the "In the Guests of Tatars" exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Ethnoart and goes on to the Yelabuga Hillfort, dated to the 10th to 12th centuries. It has three defensive ramparts and the remains of an Old Bulgar fortress mosque, which the source calls the oldest surviving building in Tatarstan and the only one from the Volga Bulgaria era.

The cemetery holds more than 70 monuments from the 19th to early 20th century, about 30 of them by the stonecarver Akhmetzakir al-Mortyvi. The oldest is the grave of the Tatar mirza Ismagil Yenikeyev, who died in 1865 aged 30. A monument to Rabiga Almukhammetova, broken in two, has also been repaired.

The last stops are the site of the Cathedral Mosque, later dismantled, the Tatar Settlement and the Local History Museum. Lena Vasilyeva from Kazan, a great-granddaughter of the merchant Mukhammetvali Almukhammetov, joined one of the first tours and saw her ancestors' restored stones.