Kielce
— — a small city the old mountains keep.
Not only on a wall.
“Capital of the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, a city of about 190,000 set among the oldest mountains in Poland. The Bishops' Palace stands above the market with its early-Baroque façade unchanged since the 1640s. The Holy Cross Mountains rise to the east, rounded and forested. The city carries hard 20th-century memory and a long mining and quarrying past. The hills go on being there. — from the studio
Kielce, 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.
Kielce is the capital of Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship in south-central Poland, with a population of roughly 190,000. The city sits between the Holy Cross Mountains (Góry Świętokrzyskie) to the east and the limestone uplands toward Kraków in the south. It received its town charter in 1364 and grew under the prince-bishops of Kraków, who held the surrounding region from the 12th century until the partitions. Warsaw is about 180 kilometres north; Kraków about 115 kilometres south.
The Palace of the Kraków Bishops, completed in 1644 under Bishop Jakub Zadzik, is the city's signature building and one of the best-preserved early-Baroque residences in Poland. Its painted plafonds and original interiors survived both World Wars largely intact and now house the National Museum in Kielce. The cathedral basilica next door, founded in 1171 and rebuilt in the 17th century, anchors the small old-town square below.
Two dates shape the city's modern memory: the 4 July 1946 pogrom, in which 42 Jewish survivors were killed and which became a turning point in postwar Polish-Jewish history, and the long mining and quarrying past of the Świętokrzyskie region, which made Kielce a centre of Polish geology. The annual MSPO defence industry exhibition each September is one of the largest in Central Europe.