Neman
— — the river that becomes the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“One of the great rivers of eastern Europe, rising in central Belarus south of Minsk and running roughly 937 kilometres west and north through Hrodna and into Lithuania before emptying into the Curonian Lagoon on the Baltic. Belarusians know it as the Nyoman; Lithuanians as the Nemunas. In Belarus the river runs through Mickiewicz country: oxbow meadows, pine woods, and the wider basin of the old castles of Mir and Niasvizh.
Neman, 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.
The Neman rises in the Minsk Upland of central Belarus, near the town of Stowbtsy, and flows about 937 kilometres west and north through Belarus and Lithuania before emptying into the Curonian Lagoon on the Baltic coast. Roughly 459 kilometres of the river lie in Belarus, where it passes through the city of Hrodna near the Polish border. In Belarusian it is the Nyoman; in Lithuanian, the Nemunas; in Russian, the Neman; in Polish, the Niemen. The river drains a basin of about 98,000 square kilometres.
The Belarusian stretch runs through quiet country: oxbow meadows, pine woods, low villages of timber houses with painted window frames. The poet Adam Mickiewicz grew up beside it at Zaosie and named the river often in Pan Tadeusz, the Polish national epic. There are no large cities between Stowbtsy and Hrodna, and long stretches see no road. In winter the river freezes over solid; by May the meadows along its banks flood and turn green within a week.
The Neman has been the dividing line of several maps. In July 1807 Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I met on a raft moored mid-river at Tilsit, in what is now Sovetsk, to sign the treaty that briefly partitioned Europe between France and Russia. The river marked the western border of the Russian Empire for much of the 19th century. Today it crosses three countries: Belarus, Lithuania, and a short stretch of Russia in the Kaliningrad oblast, before reaching the lagoon.