The status
Kazan is the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan. Today Kazan is the large scientific, economic and cultural centre. Kazan celebrated its thousand-year anniversary in 2005. Being the city of unique historical monuments, Kazan is included into the UNESCO World Heritage Cities list. In 2004 Kazan was named the best city of Russia and became the winner of Russian public award «Russian National Olympus».
Acting mayor of Kazan is Ilsur Metshin.

Location
Kazan is situated in the northwest of the Republic of Tatarstan in the place of junction of Volga and Kazanka rivers.
The way from the capital of the Russian Federation - Moscow - to Kazan takes 1 hour 20 minutes by plane, 10 hours by train or 5 days by ship.

The population and language
1,2 million people live in the city.
Different nationalities live in Kazan, you can hear speech of more than 100 nationalities here.
State languages are Russian and Tatar.

Finance
Monetary unit: Russian ruble.
Shops, restaurants and banks of Kazan accept for payment such credit cards as Visa, Master Card, Maestro, Cirrus, STB.
Nowadays Kazan is on one of the first places by quantity of banks in Russia. State and commercial banks, branches of large international and Russian banks work in the city.

Communication
Cellular communication is provided by 6 operators. Four companies use GSM900/1800 standard (Beeline, Megaphone, MTS, SMARTS), Tatinkom uses DAMPS standart, MetroTelKazan uses CDMA standart.
There are 10 Internet providers in Kazan. Here also operates the wireless Internet access network Wi-Fi. Triple Play service (voice and video transfer), IP-television, stage-by-stage change to the future generation networks – NGN are expected to be launched in the nearest future. Mobile operators plan to launch 3G network in the second half of 2008.