Malbork Castle
— — the largest brick castle the world ever built.
Not only on a wall.
“Malbork rises in red brick along the east bank of the Nogat in northern Poland. The Teutonic Knights began building it in the thirteenth century and kept enlarging it for two hundred years, until it covered more than twenty hectares and held a city's worth of soldiers, clergy, and craft. Three castles inside one wall: the High Castle for the monks, the Middle Castle for the Grand Master, the Outer Castle for everyone else. The brick is the colour of dried blood at certain hours, and a different colour entirely when the river fog comes off the water in the morning. from the studio
Malbork Castle, 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.
Malbork Castle stands on the east bank of the Nogat River in the town of Malbork, in Poland's Pomeranian Voivodeship, about sixty kilometres south of Gdańsk. Construction began in the 1270s under the Teutonic Order, which moved its headquarters here from Venice in 1309 and renamed the seat Marienburg. The complex covers roughly 21 hectares, which makes it the largest castle in the world measured by land area, and the largest brick castle ever built. UNESCO inscribed the castle as a World Heritage Site in 1997. The Order ruled from Malbork until 1457, when it was sold to King Casimir IV Jagiellon of Poland.
The castle is built almost entirely of red brick over a granite plinth, in a developed Brick Gothic style that the Teutonic Knights carried across the Baltic. It comprises three separate castles inside one outer wall: the High Castle, which housed the monastic convent and the chapel of Saint Mary; the Middle Castle, with the Grand Master's Palace and the Great Refectory; and the Outer Bailey, which held armouries, stables, and workshops. The Marienburg Museum, founded in 1961, manages the site, and decades of conservation have rebuilt sections destroyed in 1945 when the castle was heavily damaged in the Red Army's advance west.
Trains from Gdańsk Główny reach Malbork in about thirty minutes on the regional line toward Warsaw. The castle stands within easy walk of the station, across the Nogat. The Marienburg Museum offers self-guided tours with audio in several languages, and a typical visit takes three to four hours to cover the High, Middle, and Outer castles. The Siege of Malbork sound-and-light show runs on summer evenings, projected onto the western walls from the opposite bank of the river. The view from the bridge at sunset, with the red brick over still water, is the one most photographers come back for.