Constanța
— — a casino on the sea, waiting two thousand years.
Not only on a wall.
“A Black Sea port older than Rome, founded by Greeks from Miletus around the sixth century BC under the name Tomis. The poet Ovid spent his exile here and is said to be buried somewhere under the modern grid. On the seafront promontory the Cazinoul din Constanța, an Art Nouveau pavilion finished in 1910, faces the water alone, freshly restored after a long ruin. North of the city the long sand beach of Mamaia runs more than seven kilometres between the sea and Lake Siutghiol, and the freighters come and go from the largest port on the Black Sea. — from the studio
Constanța, 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.
Constanța is the oldest continuously inhabited city in Romania and the country's main port on the Black Sea. Greek colonists from Miletus founded it as Tomis around the sixth century BC. The Romans renamed it Constantiana in the fourth century AD after Constantina, sister of the emperor Constantine the Great. The modern city sits on a low limestone headland between the Black Sea and Lake Siutghiol, in Constanța County in the historical region of Northern Dobruja. The Port of Constanța, immediately south, is the largest on the Black Sea by cargo volume and a major outlet for grain from the Danube basin.
The Cazinoul din Constanța stands on the seafront promontory at the eastern edge of the old town. Built between 1904 and 1910 to a design by Daniel Renard, it is one of the finest Art Nouveau buildings on the Black Sea coast. The casino closed in the 1990s and stood empty for nearly thirty years before a state-funded restoration completed in 2024 reopened the interiors and the seafront colonnade. Inland, the Edificiul Roman cu Mozaic preserves a third-century Roman mosaic floor of roughly 850 square metres beneath a modern shelter, one of the largest surviving Roman commercial buildings on the lower Danube.
Mamaia, the resort strip on the sandbar between the sea and Lake Siutghiol immediately north of the city, runs about 8 kilometres and holds most of the country's summer beach traffic between mid-June and early September. Out of season the seafront is quiet; the casino promenade, the National History and Archaeology Museum on Piața Ovidiu, and the aquarium across from it are open year-round. Sea fog comes in from the east in late autumn and the freighters on the horizon take on the soft grey of the water.