Kazan Embankment

Kazan Embankment is named after the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God. It stood by the Kremlin's western wall, where the Nikita Demidov Mechanical Engineering College now stands. Tula residents strolled between the church and the old channel of the Upa, and rented boats by the shore. During the First World War, this strip was handed over to the expanding Tula Arms Plant. Both the shore and the former city embankment ended up behind its fence. When the area was reopened for walks in two thousand eighteen, the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God had already been gone for almost ninety years.

The final case that decided its fate began in the spring of nineteen twenty-two. Silver and gemstones were being seized from Tula churches—for the officially declared purpose of helping the starving people of the Volga region. The church council of the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God handed over the valuables only after the third demand. More than sixteen poods of silver were taken out of the building.

On the morning of April eighteenth, forty-year-old Aleksey Kuzminov, who worked here as a caretaker, opened the bell tower and climbed upstairs. There he found an icon of the Mother of God in a silver mounting set with stones. Kuzminov had not seen it before and could not explain how it had come to be in the bell tower. He reported the discovery to the priests. They moved the image into the church and held prayer services before it for two days. Believers called what happened the Kazan Miracle.

From the surviving information, it is impossible to establish whether the discovery was unexpected or whether one of the church attendants had hidden the icon in advance. Local leaders declared its appearance to be a fraud staged to resist further seizures of valuables. This cost the church attendants, caretaker Kuzminov, and Iuvenaliy, the Bishop of Tula who supported the prayer service, dearly.

The punishment dragged on for years. For Kuzminov, the discovery also meant losing the job he lived on: after this, the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God was never reopened.

In nineteen twenty-nine, the church was dismantled. Its bricks went to a factory kitchen and to a school of factory-and-plant training, where workers for the Tula Arms Plant were trained. The school became today's Nikita Demidov Mechanical Engineering College. The Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God stood on its site; by the river, only the embankment's name remains from it.