Częstochowa
— — the city the pilgrim road still runs to.
Not only on a wall.
“Częstochowa stands in southern Poland on the upper Warta. The Jasna Góra monastery on the hill above the city has held the icon called the Black Madonna since the late fourteenth century, and the road to it still fills each August with pilgrims walking from Warsaw and Kraków. The city below the hill is ordinary, industrial, working, and watches the procession come in.
Częstochowa, 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.
Częstochowa is a city of about 215,000 people in southern Poland's Silesian Voivodeship, on the upper reaches of the Warta River. It grew at the foot of Jasna Góra, the limestone hill the Pauline monastery has occupied since 1382. Warsaw lies about 220 kilometres to the north-east; Kraków about 115 to the south-east. The city itself is industrial (textiles, steel, paper) and the monastery hill rises directly above the long pedestrian spine of Aleja Najświętszej Maryi Panny, the main avenue named for the icon.
The monastery is open daily without charge. The chapel holding the icon, the Chapel of the Miraculous Image, is closed for short periods morning and evening when the silver cover is raised and lowered; outside those windows it can be entered. The walk up Jasna Góra hill from the city centre takes about fifteen minutes from the main railway station. The August walking pilgrimage from Warsaw, the Warszawska Pielgrzymka Piesza, has run since 1711 and covers roughly 280 kilometres over nine days, arriving on the fifteenth.
Jasna Góra means bright hill, named for the pale limestone of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland that runs south toward Ojców. The monastery complex on its top has been added to in waves since the late fourteenth century: a Gothic core, Baroque chapels added after the 1655 Swedish siege the defenders held off, a tall bell tower rebuilt after fire in 1900 to a height of about 106 metres, the second tallest historic tower in Poland. The walls below are the fortress walls of that 1655 defence.