Aktau
— — a white city the sea built last.
Not only on a wall.
“Aktau stands on the east coast of the Caspian Sea, a port town the Soviets drew from scratch in the early 1960s. The streets have no names, only numbers, and the wind off the water carries salt and the chalk dust of the Mangystau cliffs inland. The light here is long and pale, the kind that flattens distance and makes the desert and the sea read as one continuous white horizon. from the studio
Aktau, 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.
Aktau is the capital of Mangystau Region and the only Kazakh city on the Caspian Sea. It was founded in 1963 as Shevchenko, a closed Soviet town built around a uranium-processing complex and a desalination plant that drew its drinking water from the Caspian. The population sits near 200,000. Streets have no names: addresses are written as microdistrict, building, apartment. The city was renamed Aktau, meaning white mountain, after Kazakh independence in 1991.
South and east of the city, the Mangystau desert opens onto chalk plateaus that look like nothing else in Central Asia. The Bozjyra tract drops away in a long bay of white cliffs and free-standing pinnacles, eroded out of a Cretaceous seabed roughly 90 million years old. Tuzbair, two hours north, runs a salt flat right up to the foot of the same chalk. Both are now inside the Ustyurt and Mangystau protected landscape network.
The Caspian here is the largest enclosed body of water on Earth, but at Aktau it reads as an ordinary sea: gulls, freighters, a long swimming beach below the city. Surface water sits roughly 27 metres below global sea level. Aktau Sea Port is the country's main maritime gateway and links by ferry to Baku, on the Azerbaijani coast across the water, in eighteen to thirty hours depending on weather.