Fuchs garden, Public park in Kazan, Russia
Fuchs Garden is a square on the high left bank of the Kazanka River, on the slope known as Goat Hill. It is bounded by Malaya Krasnaya Street, Adamyuka Street, and Zhukovskogo and Podluzhnaya streets. The garden was planted with rare trees and shrubs, including blue spruces, and a bronze statue of Karl Fuchs stands there.
On 24 April 1896 Kazan's city duma, prompted by the Society of Archaeology, History and Ethnography that Karl Fuchs had helped found, voted to honour him fifty years after his death. Besides a tombstone at the Lutheran part of the Arskoe cemetery and renaming a street, it ordered a garden on the high bank of the Kazanka, the "Goat Hill". The Fuchs Garden was solemnly laid out on 11 May 1896 and planted with rare trees and shrubs, including blue spruces. The name fell almost out of use in Soviet times and was revived in 1996.
The garden is named after Karl Fuchs, a physician, botanist and ethnographer who was rector of Kazan University. In 1996 the local German community, the Kazan German Society named after Karl Fuchs, organised its improvement for the 220th anniversary of his birth and the 150th of his death. A bronze monument to Fuchs by sculptors Andrei Balashov and Igor Kozlov was unveiled there on 11 December 1996, with Germany's ambassador Ernst-Jörg von Studnitz attending.
The garden sits on the high left bank of the Kazanka, bounded by Malaya Krasnaya, Adamyuka, Zhukovskogo and Podluzhnaya streets, with Sultan-Galiev Square at its western edge. The slope below is being reclaimed for a 2,500-space car park and a concert hall, so the terrain near the river may change. Nazib Zhiganov's house overlooks the garden.
In 1997, saplings of Lebanese cedar were stolen from the garden, along with the walking stick that forms part of the bronze statue of Karl Fuchs. A popular belief holds that the face of former Kazan mayor Kamil Iskhakov is carved on the stick's knob.
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