Brunswick
— — the lion that has watched the square since 1166.
Not only on a wall.
“A small Hanseatic city on the river Oker, midway between Hannover and Magdeburg. The bronze lion in Burgplatz has stood eight and a half centuries, set there by Henry the Lion when this was the capital of a duchy that reached the Baltic. Cathedral on one side, half-timbered guildhalls on the other. The trams still rattle past the square, and the lion has not moved.
Brunswick, 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.
Braunschweig sits on the river Oker in Lower Saxony, about sixty kilometres east of Hannover. The old town is built around Burgplatz, where Henry the Lion raised Dankwarderode Castle and the cathedral of St. Blasii in the twelfth century. The medieval centre survived as five distinct quarters — Altstadt, Hagen, Neustadt, Sack, and Altewiek — each with its own market and parish church. The city was a leading member of the Hanseatic League and remains the second-largest in Lower Saxony today.
The lion of Burgplatz was cast in bronze around 1166 at the order of Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria. It stands one metre eighty at the shoulder on a plinth of red sandstone in front of the cathedral he built for his Welf dynasty. It is the oldest free-standing monument north of the Alps. The original now rests inside Dankwarderode Castle; the figure on the square is a faithful copy in the same alloy. Henry was buried beneath the cathedral floor in 1195.
The cathedral and Burgplatz lie a fifteen-minute walk from Braunschweig Hauptbahnhof, reachable by tram lines M1 and M2. The Dom is open daily and free to enter; the lion crypt and Welf treasury inside Dankwarderode require a small admission. Trains from Hannover run every half-hour and take roughly forty minutes. The square is loveliest in late afternoon, when the western light catches the cathedral's romanesque facade and the half-timbered fronts on the east side hold the warmth.