Tisza
— — the river that blooms for one week in June.
Not only on a wall.
“The longer of Hungary's two great rivers, running roughly 966 kilometers from the Ukrainian Carpathians through the Great Plain to a quiet meeting with the Danube in northern Serbia. For a few days each June the giant mayfly hatches at dusk, a million pale insects rising off the surface in slow columns. The Hungarians call it the blooming of the Tisza. The rest of the year it is a working river, slow and wide.
Tisza, 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 Tisza rises in the Ukrainian Carpathians at the confluence of the Black Tisza and the White Tisza near Rakhiv, then runs roughly 966 kilometers through western Ukraine, eastern Hungary, and northern Serbia before joining the Danube near the village of Stari Slankamen. Inside Hungary the river crosses the Great Hungarian Plain (the Alföld) past the cities of Tokaj, Szolnok, and Szeged. It is the second-longest river in Hungary after the Danube and the country's principal eastern waterway, draining most of the Pannonian Basin.
The Tisza has been heavily regulated since the nineteenth-century works of engineer Pál Vásárhelyi, which shortened its Hungarian course by roughly 450 kilometers through cut-offs and levees. The river remains prone to flooding, with major events recorded in 1879 (which destroyed most of Szeged), 1970, and 2006. Lake Tisza, an artificial reservoir created in the 1970s by the Kisköre dam, covers about 127 square kilometers in the river's middle reach and shelters more than 200 bird species. The water itself is silt-heavy and slow.
For three to four days in mid-June, the giant mayfly Palingenia longicauda hatches from the Tisza's silt in numbers visible from the bank. Adults rise off the water at dusk to mate, then die within a few hours; the entire adult lifespan is shorter than a single afternoon. Hungarians call the phenomenon tiszavirágzás, the blooming of the Tisza. The species was once widespread across Europe and now survives in significant numbers only on the middle Tisza and a handful of its tributaries.