Gomel
— — a palace at the bend of a slow river.
Not only on a wall.
“The second city of Belarus, set on the high right bank of the Sozh in the country's southeast. Catherine the Great gave the estate to Pyotr Rumyantsev in 1775 after the first partition of Poland, and the palace and park that grew from his gift still hold the centre of the city. The Sozh runs slow here, and from the chapel terrace the far bank is all forest.
Gomel, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Gomel sits on the Sozh River in southeastern Belarus, about 300 kilometres south of Minsk and close to the borders with Russia and Ukraine. The city was first mentioned in 1142 in the chronicles of the Kievan Rus, and grew under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russian Empire in turn. With a population of roughly 500,000 it is the second-largest city in the country. The administrative centre of Gomel Region, it remains a working industrial and rail hub on the line between Minsk and Kyiv.
The Rumyantsev-Paskevich Palace anchors the historic centre. Count Pyotr Rumyantsev-Zadunaisky began building in 1777 on land granted by Catherine the Great after the first partition of Poland. His son sold the estate in 1834 to the field marshal Ivan Paskevich, who added the four-storey tower and the chapel-tomb in Russian-Byzantine style. The Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, completed in 1819 to a design by John Clark, stands on the palace grounds. The ensemble survived German occupation between 1941 and 1943 and was restored across the postwar decades.
The Sozh is a left tributary of the Dnieper, rising in Russia near Smolensk and joining the larger river south of Gomel after roughly 650 kilometres. The high right bank in the city gives the palace its commanding view; the left bank is low and forested for most of its length. Spring floods historically reshape the meadows below the bluff, and locals walk the embankment on summer evenings the way Saint Petersburg walks the Neva. Ice typically closes the river to small boats from December into March.