Warsaw
— — a city that learned to rebuild itself, brick for brick.
Not only on a wall.
“A capital that almost wasn't. The Old Town the visitor walks through today was reassembled from rubble after the Second World War, guided by the Bellotto cityscapes painted in the 1770s. The Royal Castle reopened in 1984. Across the river, Praga kept its older bones. The Vistula carries the same broad bend it always has.
Warsaw, 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.
Warsaw sits on both banks of the Vistula in east-central Poland, the capital since King Sigismund III Vasa moved the court from Kraków in 1596. The city is the seat of the Masovian Voivodeship and the country's largest, with a population above 1.8 million inside the city limits. The river divides the rebuilt left-bank centre, with the Old Town and Royal Route, from the older surviving fabric of Praga on the right bank. Elevation in the centre runs around 100 metres above sea level.
The Old Town was destroyed almost completely during the German suppression of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Reconstruction ran from 1945 into the 1960s, working from prewar inventories and the eighteenth-century cityscapes of Bernardo Bellotto, known in Poland as Canaletto, whose paintings were used to verify facade details. UNESCO inscribed the rebuilt Old Town in 1980 as an exceptional example of post-war reconstruction. The Royal Castle, blown up in 1944, reopened to the public in 1984 after a privately funded restoration.
The Palace of Culture and Science, a gift from the Soviet Union completed in 1955, still anchors the skyline at 237 metres including its spire, the tallest building in Poland for most of its life. Łazienki Park, the largest park in the city at 76 hectares, holds the Palace on the Isle and a Chopin monument where free piano recitals run on summer Sundays. The composer's birthplace at Żelazowa Wola sits about 50 kilometres west of the city and is managed as a museum by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute.