Vltava
— — the river Smetana set to music, still doing what the music said.
Not only on a wall.
“The longest river in the Czech lands, gathered out of two streams in the Šumava forest and turned north through Český Krumlov and Prague before giving itself up to the Elbe at Mělník. Smetana wrote the river into Má vlast in 1874 and the music still tracks the water almost bend for bend. Boats run all summer; the banks in Prague stay busy after dark.
Vltava, 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 Vltava is the longest river in the Czech Republic, running about 430 kilometres from its source in the Šumava mountains on the Bavarian border to its mouth at the Elbe in the town of Mělník. It rises as two streams, Teplá Vltava and Studená Vltava, that meet near Volary, then flows north through the South Bohemian basin, the historic town of Český Krumlov, the Lipno reservoir, and on through Prague, where it passes under sixteen bridges in the city centre alone. Smetana's tone poem Vltava, the second movement of Má vlast, was completed in 1874.
The river carries about 150 cubic metres per second on average through Prague and drops nearly a thousand metres of elevation along its course. A chain of nine dams, built between 1936 and 1992, regulates flow and powers a string of hydroelectric stations; the largest, the Orlík dam south of Prague, holds the country's biggest reservoir. Below the dams the river is calm enough that a wooden raft or a hired rowboat can take the central reaches in a day, while the upper Vltava above Český Krumlov still runs fast over gravel and stone.
Most visitors meet the Vltava in Prague, where the Charles Bridge has carried foot traffic across the river since 1402. Český Krumlov, three hours south by train, sits in a tight oxbow of the river below its painted castle and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Šumava National Park protects the headwaters and the peat bogs around them. Summer is for boat trips and the embankment cafés; late autumn is for fog along the river at dawn. The water rarely freezes thickly below the dams, even in cold winters.