Daugava
— — the slow seam of a country.
Not only on a wall.
“The river of Latvia. About a thousand kilometres long, rising in the Valdai Hills and reaching the Baltic at Riga, where it splits the old city from Pārdaugava. Three hydroelectric dams hold its lower run. Folk songs name it māte, mother. From the studio, the place reads as a wide grey-silver line under low northern light, the colour of a country thinking.
Daugava, 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 Daugava runs about 1,020 kilometres from its source in the Valdai Hills of western Russia to the Gulf of Riga. Of that course, 352 kilometres lie inside Latvia, the longest of the river's three national segments after Russia and Belarus. The city of Riga, the country's capital, sits on the river's lower bank where it widens into the gulf. Three large hydroelectric dams — at Pļaviņas, Ķegums, and Rīga — were built between the 1930s and 1970s, drowning a stretch of sandstone cliffs that once defined the middle valley.
The river's lower reach is wide and slow, more estuary than current by the time it reaches the harbour. The dams that hold the middle course generate roughly two-thirds of Latvia's domestic electricity in an average year. Above the reservoirs, the Daugava still narrows past forested banks and small towns — Daugavpils, Krāslava, Jēkabpils — that mark the old river crossings. Spring floods, once severe enough to clear ice from Riga's docks within hours, are now mostly absorbed upstream. Below the city, the water meets the Baltic on a low, sand-bar coast.
The Daugava sits at the centre of Latvian folk memory. The dainas, traditional four-line folk verses collected by Krišjānis Barons in the late nineteenth century, name the river as Daugavas māte — mother Daugava. The Latvian Song and Dance Festival, held in Riga every five years since 1873 and on the UNESCO Intangible Heritage list, takes the river as one of its recurring images. Midsummer Līgo nights are still kept along its banks. The river is the country's longest continuous geography and one of its oldest symbols.