The artist captured the Siberian outpost in the old Kazan on the lithograph from the album Views of Kazan, drawn from life by Eduard Tournerelli. The picture depicts see a group of officers, their horses and dogs in the foreground with some horse riders behind them crossing the bridge. Tournerelli painted a church with a bell tower in the left part of the lithograph.

The temple was designed by an unknown architect in honor of St. Barbara of Iliopol, who is revered as the savior from a sudden and violent death. The historians cannot establish the exact date of the church’s construction. They believe that it was built around 1781, when the entire Kazan was restored after the devastating uprising under the leadership of Emelian Pugachev. According to a legend, the residence of Kazan’s vice-governor Nefyod Kudryavtsev, killed by the rebels, was turned into the Varvarinskaya church. Originally, the temple was not heated, with a warm side-chapel added to it later. The main shrines of the church were the icon of St. Barbara and the image of the myrrh-bearing women.

Many famous people visited Varvarinskaya church in different years: Alexander Radishchev, Alexander Herzen, Nicolay Chernyshevsky and others. The young Fyodor Chaliapin sometimes sang in the choir of St. Barbara’s Church.

The temple got dilapidated by the end of the XIX century and was partially dismantled. A new Russian-style church was built with the parishioners’ donations. The diocesan architect Fyodor Malinovsky was in charge of the construction works.

The church was closed during the Soviet period. The building was initially handed over to the workers' club, then it housed a cinema and later a prosthetic workshop. Later, one of the departments of the Kazan Institute was located there. In 1994, the church was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Varvarinskaya church stood on the city’s outskirts in the XIX century, near the Siberian road and the Siberian outpost bridge, depicted in the lithograph. The bridge with a colonnade was built in 1806 after the design by Yakov Shelkovnikov. It served, for a long time, as a border that separated Kazan from the Arsk Field.

Many prisoners were sent into exile along the Siberian road. It was on this road that the convicted Decembrists, participants to the uprising of December 14, 1825, and their wives went to hard labour in exile. The Varvarinskaya church was the last temple where they could pray before their long journey to Siberia.