Who said that Kazan is 1000 years old?

By the way, lots of people believe that finds can be falsified. Thanks God, the Czech coin happened to be the earliest coin and the only one in the world. How could we possibly falsify it? After that case all the finds that might be connected somehow with the age of Kazan underwent examination in order to state their being original. In this case with the Czech coin, the specialist of Hermitage carried out spectrum analysis; now we have a documentary proof that the coin was found by excavations. Thus there was no trace of the finds falsification.

The age of the finds was defined not only but those archaeologists who found them, but by their colleagues from History Institution, Kazan University and other specialists as well. For instance the Czech coin was examined by the Czech, cover piece of Hungarian type - in Budapest, and women’s beads were studied by Johann Kalmer from Gumboldt University in Berlin. So the finds that could tell us the age of Kazan were studied by specialists from 20 cities of Russia and 22 different countries.

But archaeological finds is only the beginning of work. Perhaps it’s possible to counterfeit finds, but what about cultural layers? Imagine, we take away layer of ground of the 20, 19-th century, up to the end of the 10-th century. We single out the layer of pre-Mongolian period dated by these finds. How can you counterfeit the layer? It’s impossible! This layer was examined not only by the archaeologists taking part in excavations, but by other specialists from different cities, first of all from Moscow.  Of considerate assistance were academician Valentine Vasilevich Sedov and his wife Maria Vladimirovna, who worked all her life in Suzdal; Anatoly Nikolaevich Kirpichnikov from St.Petersburg and many other specialists on medieval towns…

All our excavations were shown to our colleagues. We showed them pre-Mongolian layer, which is actually the most convincing argument proving that the city is 1000 years old. There’s a layer that accumulated since the end of the 10-th century and was growing all this time during the 11-th, 12-th and the beginning of the 13-th centuries. This is the oldest layer. But that’s not enough. The layer should contain some objects – remains of dwellings, household buildings, burials, ancient cemeteries, - this is life and people can’t do without all this.  We managed to find all kinds of such remains; and all of them were found exactly within this layer. But if we speak about the town, we should find some fortifications, as no town can live without them. And we did find fortifications! About 10 excavations were dedicated to researches of the fortifications of ancient Kazan.

All right, we found fortifications, but our colleagues are still in doubt. They say: “These are remains of the Kremlin and we know that in Kremlin usually lived governors and military garrisons. What about the rest of population – craftsmen, merchants? Where did they live? Please, find these places”. We searched outside the Kremlin and we found traces of handicraft exactly of that period.