Mogilev
— — a river city that keeps its own counsel.
Not only on a wall.
“An old river town in the east of Belarus, where the Dnieper bends and the streets keep the names they had two centuries ago. The Town Hall tower stands over the central square, rebuilt to its eighteenth-century silhouette after the war took everything down. Trams run past brick churches and Soviet courtyards in the same block. A regional capital that has watched empires come and go, and still puts out its market awnings on Saturday mornings. — from the studio
Mogilev, 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.
Mogilev sits on the Dnieper River in eastern Belarus, about 200 kilometres east of Minsk, and serves as the administrative centre of Mogilev Region. The city's recorded history reaches back to the thirteenth century, when it grew as a trading post on the river road south. Population sits near 350,000, making it the country's third-largest city after Minsk and Gomel. The land here is gently rolling, the river wide and slow, and the surrounding region is one of birch forest and farmland.
The Town Hall on Slavy Square is the city's most photographed building, a brick tower with a green spire that was rebuilt in 2008 to match its eighteenth-century form after wartime destruction. Nearby stands the Cathedral of Saint Stanislaus, a Baroque Catholic church completed in 1752, with restored frescoes inside. The Orthodox Cathedral of the Three Saints, finished in 1914, anchors the other end of the historic core. Together these three buildings hold the layered religious history of the city — Polish-Lithuanian, Orthodox Russian, Soviet, and present-day Belarusian.
The city is reached by rail from Minsk in about three hours, or by the M4 highway in roughly two and a half. Most travellers walk the pedestrianised Leninskaya Street, which runs from the Town Hall down through the old merchant quarter. Summer brings long evenings on the river embankment and the annual Magutny Bozha sacred music festival, held since 1993. Winters are long and cold, with snow on the ground from late November into March. The Mogilev Regional Art Museum, named for Pavel Maslenikov, holds a strong collection of Belarusian painting.