Culture
In general, the culture of the Kazan Khanate descended from that of Volga Bulgaria. Cultural elements of the Golden Horde were also present in noble circles.
A large part of the urban population were literate. Large libraries were present in mosques and madrassahs. Kazan became a center of science and theology.
Although Islamic influence predominated, lay literature also developed. The most prominent Old Tatar language poets were Möxämmädyar, Ömmi Kamal, Möxämmädämin, Ğärifbäk, and Qolşärif. Möxämmädyar renovated the traditions of Kazan poetry, and his verses were very popular.
The city of Bolghar retained its position as a sacred place, but had this function only, due to the emergence of Kazan as a major economic and political center in the 1430s.
The architecture of the khanate is characterized by white-stone architecture and wood carvings.
Read more about this topic: Khanate Of Kazan
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)