Iron Gate
— — the gorge the river spent ten million years opening.
Not only on a wall.
“The Iron Gate is the gorge where the Danube forces a way through the southern Carpathians, between Romania and Serbia, on its long run to the Black Sea. The river narrows from kilometres wide to as little as 150 metres and turns slate-green between cliffs that rise more than 300 metres above the water. Above the narrowest reach, a giant face of Decebalus — the last king of free Dacia — has been carved into the rock above the river. Below it, the great twin dam closed in 1972 and turned the rapids that had foiled steamboats for a century into deep slack water. from the studio
Iron Gate, 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.
The Iron Gate, or Iron Gates, is a 134-kilometre stretch of gorge on the lower Danube between the southern Carpathian Mountains of Romania and the Serbian Carpathians, ending near the town of Drobeta-Turnu Severin in Romania and Kladovo in Serbia. The river narrows at the Kazan reach to as little as about 150 metres wide between cliffs rising over 300 metres above the water. The Romanian bank is protected as the Iron Gates Natural Park, established in 2000, covering roughly 115,000 hectares; the Serbian bank as Đerdap National Park, established in 1974. The combined protected area is one of the largest river-canyon reserves in Europe.
Two stone landmarks anchor the gorge. On the Romanian bank, the Rock Sculpture of Decebalus — a 55-metre carving of the last Dacian king who fought Rome in 101–106 AD — was cut into the cliff between 1994 and 2004 by twelve sculptors working on ropes, the tallest rock relief in Europe. On the Serbian bank, opposite the carving, a Latin inscription called the Tabula Traiana was placed in 100 AD to mark the completion of Trajan's road through the gorge, a cantilevered ledge that allowed Roman legions to march east toward the conquest of Dacia. The Trajan inscription was raised above the new waterline before the reservoir filled in 1972.
The Iron Gate I hydroelectric and navigation dam, jointly built by Romania and Yugoslavia and inaugurated in 1972, is the largest hydroelectric station on the Danube, with an installed capacity of about 2,160 megawatts split evenly between the two banks. Iron Gate II, downstream near Negotin and Drobeta-Turnu Severin, was completed in 1984 and adds roughly 500 megawatts. The first dam raised the upstream water level by as much as 35 metres and submerged the historic rapids and the island of Ada Kaleh. The reservoir behind the dam now holds the navigable river that earlier captains called impassable in low water and dangerous in flood.