Spree
— — the river that loses itself in the alder before it remembers Berlin.
Not only on a wall.
“A river that loses its single line in the Spreewald, breaks into hundreds of small channels under the alders, then collects itself again to run north through Berlin. Locals still move groceries and post by flat-bottomed punt. The water is slow, tea-coloured from the peat, and the silence between villages is the kind only old water makes. from the studio
Spree, 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 Spree rises in the Lusatian Highlands near the Czech border and runs roughly 400 km north and west, through Bautzen, the Spreewald, and the centre of Berlin, before joining the Havel at Spandau. In the middle of that run it loses its single channel inside the Spreewald, a low alder forest where the river splits into about 1,575 km of slow, navigable waterways. UNESCO designated the Spreewald a Biosphere Reserve in 1991, recognising the Sorbian villages that still live on the water.
The water reads tea-coloured because the Spreewald floor is peat — the river pulls tannin out of the ground as it moves. Inside the biosphere reserve the current barely runs; the local boat is the Kahn, a flat-bottomed punt poled from the stern, and post and groceries still move that way to a few houses in Lehde, an island village reachable only by water. The Spreewaldgurken pickled in those villages carries a European Protected Geographical Indication granted in 1999.
Most visitors reach the Spreewald from Lübbenau, about an hour by regional train from Berlin Hauptbahnhof. Kahn tours run from April through October, with the longer routes pushing into Lehde and Leipe. Winter freezes the smaller channels and the boats come ashore. In Berlin the river runs past the Reichstag, the Museum Island, and Friedrichstraße before turning west toward Spandau, where the Havel takes it on toward the Elbe. The Sorbian and German names sit side by side on most signs in Lusatia.