Korčula
— — the town that grew like the ribs of a fish.
Not only on a wall.
“An island town on the Pelješac Channel, halfway down the Dalmatian coast. The old town sits on a small oval peninsula, its streets laid out in a herringbone so the summer wind reaches every door but the winter bura never gets a straight run. Stone houses the colour of pale honey, a cathedral tower built by local masters, a claim — disputed but lovingly maintained — that Marco Polo was born here. In late July the Moreška sword dance is still performed in the square outside the land gate. from the studio
Korčula, 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.
Korčula is the sixth-largest island in the Adriatic, about 47 kilometres long and 8 wide, lying off the Dalmatian coast of southern Croatia and separated from the Pelješac peninsula by a narrow channel barely a kilometre across at its tightest. The walled old town of Korčula sits on a small egg-shaped promontory on the island's north coast, in Dubrovnik-Neretva County. About 15,000 people live on the island year-round; the town itself has a few thousand. The Greeks colonised it in the 6th century BC, the Venetians ruled from the 13th to the 18th, and the layered fortifications still show both hands.
The old town's streets are laid out as a fishbone — a central spine running the length of the peninsula with side lanes peeling off at angles. The streets on the western side are straight, opening to the cooling maestral wind; those on the east curve, breaking up the cold winter bura before it can race through. The pale stone is mostly local: Korčulan limestone was prized across the Adriatic, and masons from the island worked on Dubrovnik's walls and palaces. The Cathedral of St. Mark, finished in the 15th century, was built by a family of local stonecutters and carries a Tintoretto altarpiece.
The Moreška, a stylised sword dance dramatising a battle between two kings over a kidnapped bride, has been performed on Korčula since at least the 16th century and is now staged most Mondays and Thursdays through the summer, with the largest performance on St. Theodore's Day on 29 July. Two troupes of twenty-odd dancers — the Black King's men in red, the White King's in black — meet in seven choreographed rounds of clashing swords. The dance is unique to Korčula; similar Moorish-and-Christian dances once spread across the Mediterranean but only this one survives in unbroken practice.