Fort Douaumont
— the hill that broke and then held.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest of the forts built to defend Verdun, dug into a low hill above the Meuse and finished in 1913. On 25 February 1916, four days into the German offensive, a small infantry party walked in almost without resistance and held it. The French retook it on 24 October the same year. The hill above is still pocked with shellfire a century on. The chapel inside the casemate is lit by one electric bulb.
Fort Douaumont, 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.
Fort Douaumont sits on a low hill six kilometres northeast of Verdun in the Meuse department of northeastern France, the largest of the nineteen forts of the Séré de Rivières system built to defend the city after 1874. The fort was completed in its present concrete form in 1913, with a top-armoured roof of eight metres of concrete and earth. It changed hands twice during the Battle of Verdun in 1916, a battle that left roughly 700,000 French and German casualties across ten months.
The fort is built into the hillside in three subterranean levels, with two retractable 155 mm gun turrets, four 75 mm turrets, and casemates dug straight into the rock. A magazine explosion on 8 May 1916 killed 679 German soldiers inside the fort; they are sealed behind a wall in one of the lower galleries, marked by a small chapel lit by a single bulb. The casemate corridors run several hundred metres and remain humid and cold even in August.
The fort sits inside the Verdun Battlefield Memorial site, six kilometres northeast of Verdun on the Route Départementale 913. It is open daily from April through mid-November, with reduced winter hours, and admission is roughly five euros. The visit takes about an hour and includes the lower galleries, the sealed chamber of the German dead, and the artillery turrets. The Ossuary of Douaumont, with the bones of about 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers, stands a kilometre west.