Ural River
— — a river two continents argue across.
Not only on a wall.
“The Ural rises in the southern Ural Mountains in Russia, runs roughly 2,400 kilometres south and west across the Kazakh steppe, and ends in the Caspian Sea at Atyrau. It is the traditional dividing line between Europe and Asia for most of its length. The river is shallow, slow, and brown-green in the lower reaches, with high reed banks. It still carries one of the last wild sturgeon runs to the sea each spring.
Ural River, 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 Ural is a river of about 2,428 kilometres, rising in the southern Ural Mountains in the Republic of Bashkortostan in Russia and running south and west across the Kazakh steppe to the Caspian Sea. It is conventionally considered the boundary between Europe and Asia along most of its course. The river drains a basin of roughly 231,000 square kilometres and passes through the Russian cities of Magnitogorsk and Orenburg before crossing into Kazakhstan, where it flows through Oral, the former Uralsk, and reaches the sea at the port city of Atyrau.
The Ural is considered the third-longest river of Europe, after the Volga and the Danube. Its flow is modest for its length, averaging around 400 cubic metres per second at the Caspian mouth, because much of the basin is dry steppe and the river drops only about 670 metres over its full course. It is one of the last large European rivers without a major dam on its lower reaches, which is why the Caspian beluga, Russian, and stellate sturgeon can still run upriver to spawn each spring.
For most of its 2,400 kilometres the Ural runs through low, lightly populated country. Between Orenburg and Oral, the steppe on either bank is open grassland and shallow oxbow lakes; below Oral the river slows further and the banks turn to high reed marsh. Atyrau, with about 360,000 residents at the mouth, is the largest settlement on the lower river. The wind through the reed banks and the long flat horizon make the sound of the river itself unusually present, even at distance.