Poznań
— — where the goats butt heads at noon.
Not only on a wall.
“The market square in the western Polish city of Poznań, ringed by tall burgher houses in Renaissance pastels. The Town Hall in the middle keeps a sixteenth-century mechanical clock; two metal goats step out and butt heads on the stroke of twelve. Across the river, the cathedral island holds the oldest stone church in Poland.
Poznań, 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.
Poznań sits on the Warta River in the Greater Poland region of western Poland, roughly halfway between Berlin and Warsaw. Population is about 540,000, making it the country's fifth-largest city. The historical core is built around the Old Market Square (Stary Rynek), one of the largest medieval squares in Central Europe at roughly 140 metres on a side. East of the square, across two arms of the Warta, lies Ostrów Tumski — the cathedral island where the Polish state was founded in the tenth century.
Ostrów Tumski, the cathedral island across the Warta, holds the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul — Poland's oldest cathedral, founded around 968 on the site where Duke Mieszko I was baptised two years earlier. The present brick-Gothic building dates to the fourteenth century, with Baroque interiors added in the eighteenth. The crypt contains the tombs of Mieszko I and his son Bolesław the Brave, the first crowned king of Poland. The island is reached by the Bishop Jordan footbridge from the Śródka district.
Twice a day at noon the mechanical clock on the Renaissance Town Hall opens its small doors and two metal goats step out to butt heads twelve times. The mechanism was built into the building's 1551 reconstruction by the Italian architect Giovanni Battista di Quadro and has run for nearly five centuries. The Saint Martin's croissant festival on November eleventh fills the city with rogale świętomarcińskie — a sweet poppy, almond, and candied-orange pastry made under EU protected designation only here, sold by the tens of thousands across the day.