Oder
— — a river that starts small in a beech wood.
Not only on a wall.
“The Odra begins at a spring on the slope of Fidlův kopec, under the beech and spruce of the Oderské vrchy. For its first hundred kilometres it runs north through Moravian farmland, past Nový Jičín and Ostrava, picking up the Opava and the Ostravice before it crosses into Poland. In the Czech reach the river is still narrow enough to step across in places near the source. The water reads slate-grey under cloud, brown after rain. — from the studio
Oder, 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 Oder, in Czech the Odra, rises on the eastern flank of Fidlův kopec in the Oderské vrchy hills of Moravia, at an elevation around 633 metres. It runs for roughly 132 kilometres on Czech soil before crossing into Poland near Bohumín, then continues north through Silesia and Brandenburg, reaching the Baltic by way of the Szczecin Lagoon. The total length is about 854 kilometres. In its upper reach it drains the Moravian Gate and the Ostrava basin, picking up the Opava, the Ostravice and the Olše as principal tributaries.
South of Ostrava the river widens into the floodplain of the Poodří Protected Landscape Area, a 81-square-kilometre band of oxbows, wet meadows and alder stands designated in 1991. The Poodří is a Ramsar wetland and one of the most important migratory bird sites in Moravia, with white storks, corncrakes and bitterns recorded in numbers each spring. Carp ponds dating from the Middle Ages still sit beside the channel. The river itself meanders here rather than running straight, which is rare for a river of its size in central Europe.
The spring itself is marked with a small stone in a beech and spruce wood above the village of Kozlov, reached by a marked path from the road. The forest absorbs the sound of the highway down in the valley. In the first kilometres the channel is narrow, leaf-littered, and crossed by simple plank bridges. People come on weekends to walk the source loop and to drink at the spring, but on most weekdays the upper river is quiet, the kind of quiet that holds for a long time after the last walker has passed.