Dniester
— — a slow grey-green pulled through limestone.
Not only on a wall.
“The Dniester runs south from the Carpathians, slips through Ukraine, and then leans against Moldova for hundreds of miles before it turns into the Black Sea. Along the Moldovan bank it cuts a soft canyon through pale limestone; cliff monasteries at Saharna and Țipova hang above the slow water. The river is the border with Transnistria for much of its lower run. The wine villages on the right bank work the same fields they have since the seventeenth century.
Dniester, 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 Dniester rises on the northern slope of the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine and runs roughly 1,352 kilometres south-east through Ukraine and Moldova before emptying into the Dniester Liman on the Black Sea coast. About 660 kilometres of its course traces or borders Moldova, separating the right-bank Moldovan heartland from the breakaway region of Transnistria on the left bank. Its drainage basin covers around 72,100 square kilometres. The river feeds the Dubăsari and Novodnistrovsk reservoirs and supplies drinking water to much of central Moldova, including the capital, Chișinău.
Below Soroca the river has worn a soft canyon into the pale Sarmatian limestone of the Moldovan Plateau, and the cliffs above the right bank carry some of the oldest cave monasteries in eastern Europe. The complex at Țipova, in Rezina district, has chapels cut into the rock face that historians date in part to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Saharna monastery a little farther south sits where a small tributary drops into the Dniester through twenty-two waterfalls. Soroca Fortress, finished in 1499 under Ștefan cel Mare, anchors the river's north-Moldovan bend.
Flow on the lower Dniester is gentler than the Carpathian headwaters suggest. The Dubăsari hydroelectric dam, finished in 1954, slows the river through a 67-kilometre reservoir, and the Novodnistrovsk dam upstream in Ukraine, completed in the 1980s, regulates spring snowmelt across the whole basin. Mean annual discharge near the mouth is about 310 cubic metres per second. The water reads grey-green most of the year and turns silt-brown in spring; in late summer the channel narrows enough that small craft launch from village beaches at Vadul lui Vodă, fifteen kilometres upstream of Chișinău.