Debrecen
— — the yellow church the plain leans on.
Not only on a wall.
“Debrecen reads the way the plain reads — long horizons, low light, the twin towers of the Great Reformed Church holding the centre. Hungarians call it the Calvinist Rome, and the yellow neoclassical facade above Kossuth Square has been the city's anchor for two centuries. Trams cross in front of it. On August twentieth the flower carnival floats turn the corner here. — from the studio
Debrecen, 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.
Debrecen is the second-largest city in Hungary and the seat of Hajdú-Bihar County, with a population of roughly 200,000. It lies on the eastern edge of the Great Hungarian Plain, about 220 kilometres east of Budapest and 30 kilometres from the Romanian border. The city has been a centre of Hungarian Reformed Protestantism since the 16th century, which earned it the long-standing nickname of the Calvinist Rome. The University of Debrecen, founded in 1538 as the Reformed College and chartered as a university in 1912, anchors the northern districts.
The Great Reformed Church on Kossuth Square is the city's defining building — a neoclassical hall church with twin towers, finished in 1821 to a design by Mihály Péchy. Its yellow ochre facade was chosen to match the older Reformed College behind it and has been kept that colour through every restoration since. The Hungarian Declaration of Independence was read here on 14 April 1849, when the revolutionary government had moved to Debrecen ahead of the advancing Austrian army. The church seats about three thousand and remains in regular Reformed use.
The civic calendar turns on 20 August, Saint Stephen's Day, when the Debrecen Flower Carnival has rolled down Piac Street since 1966. Twenty or so floats, each clad in tens of thousands of fresh blooms grown for the day, leave the Great Church and process to the Nagyerdő stadium. Outside the carnival, the Nagyerdő forest park on the northern edge of the city is the everyday lung, with the Aquaticum thermal complex and the zoo set inside it. Trams 1 and 2 run the route end to end.