Szeged
— — a city the flood rebuilt on its own ring.
Not only on a wall.
“In March 1879 the Tisza broke its banks and Szeged came down. The city that rose in its place was planned to a ring, the inner boulevards funded by the European capitals that sent help. The Votive Church on Dóm tér was the long apology to the river, twin brick towers above a square where a music festival still runs each summer. Paprika hangs in the markets in red strings. — from the studio
Szeged, 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.
Szeged is the third largest city in Hungary, set on the Great Hungarian Plain where the River Tisza meets its tributary the Maros, roughly a hundred and seventy kilometres south-east of Budapest. The population is about a hundred and sixty thousand. The city is the seat of Csongrád-Csanád county and home to the University of Szeged, founded in 1581 in Kolozsvár and re-established here in 1921. The street plan is unusual for central Europe: an inner ring and a great outer boulevard, laid down in the rebuilding after the 1879 flood.
On the night of 12 March 1879 the Tisza overtopped its dykes and within a few days only a few hundred of Szeged's six thousand houses were standing. Vienna, Paris, London, Brussels, Rome, Berlin and Moscow sent aid, and the new ring boulevards still carry their names. The river was rebuilt against, not away from: the embankments were raised, the channel straightened, and the city centre was lifted by about a metre and a half. The Tisza now runs quietly through the middle of town, crossed by the steel Belvárosi bridge.
The Votive Church, promised to the Virgin after the flood and consecrated in 1930, dominates Dóm tér, a brick square ringed with arcades. Each summer since 1931, with interruptions, the square has been the stage for the Szegedi Szabadtéri Játékok, the open-air theatre festival, with seating for several thousand under the towers. The square's carillon plays at noon. Around it the university buildings, the Serbian Orthodox church, and the small lanes of the old palánk run together at walking scale.