Sofia
— — gold domes against a grey winter sky.
Not only on a wall.
“A capital with a mountain on its southern edge. Sofia sits at about 550 metres on the Sofia Plain, with Vitosha rising behind it to 2,290. The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, finished in 1912, holds the centre — neo-Byzantine, gilded domes, the bells visible from the boulevards in three directions. Two blocks away, the small brick basilica of Sveta Sofia, the city's namesake, has stood in some form since the sixth century. People have lived here for almost eight thousand years, which is the kind of fact a city wears quietly.
Sofia, 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.
Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria, set on the Sofia Plain at an average elevation of about 550 metres, with the Vitosha massif rising to 2,290 metres along its southern edge. Its metropolitan area holds around 1.3 million people, the largest in the Balkans outside Athens and Istanbul. The site has been continuously inhabited since the seventh millennium BC; the Romans knew it as Serdica, the Ottomans as Sofya, and the modern capital was confirmed after the Treaty of Berlin in 1879. The city sits at the crossroads of the historic routes from Belgrade to Istanbul and from the Danube to the Aegean.
The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, completed in 1912 to a design by Alexander Pomerantsev, anchors the city's monumental quarter. The neo-Byzantine plan holds up to 5,000 worshippers under a gilded central dome 45 metres high. A short walk west, the small red-brick basilica of Sveta Sofia gives the city its name; the present building dates to the sixth century under Justinian, on the foundations of two earlier churches. Below the Largo, the rotunda of Saint George, fourth century, is the oldest preserved building in the capital, set in a courtyard between the Presidency and the Sheraton.
Sofia has a humid continental climate moderated by the Vitosha rain shadow. Winters are cold; January averages below freezing and the city sees significant snowfall, with Vitosha holding ski runs above Aleko from December into March. Summer averages climb into the high twenties but rarely above thirty for long, kept down by mountain air. The best months for walking the centre are late April through early June, when the chestnuts on Vasil Levski Boulevard flower, and again from late September through October when the boulevards turn copper.