Bielsko-Biała
— — two old towns the river finally stopped dividing.
Not only on a wall.
“Two towns on opposite banks of the Biała river, one Silesian, one Lesser Polish, married by administrative decree in 1951. The textile mills that earned the place the name Little Vienna have mostly gone quiet; the Sułkowski castle still holds the high ground above the market square. South of the city the Beskid foothills begin, and the trail up Szyndzielnia leaves from a tram stop at the edge of town. — from the studio
Bielsko-Biała, 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.
Bielsko-Biała sits in the Silesian Voivodeship of southern Poland, at the northern foot of the Silesian Beskids, about 85 kilometres south of Katowice and 80 kilometres southwest of Kraków. The city as it now stands was formed in 1951 by the administrative union of two historically separate towns, Bielsko on the west bank of the Biała river and Biała on the east — one in Austrian Silesia, the other in Lesser Poland. Population is roughly 165,000, making it the twenty-second largest city in the country.
Above the old market square stands the Sułkowski Castle, a Gothic core extended through the Renaissance and Baroque, owned by the princely Sułkowski family from 1752 until 1945 and now the city museum. The downtown's eclectic and Art Nouveau facades earned Bielsko the nineteenth-century nickname Little Vienna, when Habsburg-era textile money rebuilt the centre. Architects from Vienna and Brünn worked here. The 1898 Theatre Polski and the 1899 main post office still anchor the corners around plac Bolesława Chrobrego.
South of the city the Silesian Beskids rise to Klimczok at 1,117 metres and Szyndzielnia at 1,026 metres, reachable from a cable car at the southern edge of town that has run since 1953. Bielsko-Biała is also home to Studio Filmów Rysunkowych, the animation studio that produced the dog Reksio and the children's series Bolek i Lolek; a small statue of Reksio sits on the main pedestrian street. Winter brings ski lifts at Szczyrk, twenty minutes south.