Timișoara
— the square that ended a dictatorship.
Not only on a wall.
“A Habsburg city in the Banat region of western Romania, where the December 1989 Revolution against the Ceaușescu regime began outside a pastor's house in Piața Maria. Timișoara held a European Capital of Culture year in 2023 and carries one of the largest concentrations of Baroque architecture in southeastern Europe. The Bega Canal cuts through the centre; the painted facades of Piața Unirii hold their colour after three centuries. — from the studio
Timișoara, 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.
Timișoara is the largest city in western Romania and the historical capital of the Banat, a region that passed through Ottoman, Habsburg, and Hungarian rule before joining Romania in 1920. About 250,000 people live within the city, with roughly 70,000 more in the surrounding metropolitan area. The Bega River, channelled into the Bega Canal during the eighteenth century, runs west through the centre. Three main squares anchor the old town of Cetate: Piața Unirii to the north, Piața Libertății in the middle, and Piața Victoriei to the south by the Orthodox Cathedral.
The Cetate carries one of the largest surviving concentrations of Baroque architecture in southeastern Europe, built after the Habsburgs took the city from the Ottomans in 1716. The yellow Baroque facade of the Roman Catholic Dom on Piața Unirii dates to 1736; the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral across the square is roughly contemporary. Piața Victoriei, laid out in late nineteenth-century Vienna Secession style, anchors the Romanian Orthodox Metropolitan Cathedral at its south end, completed in 1946 to a Moldavian-revival design with eleven towers and coloured-tile roofs.
On 16 December 1989, protesters gathered outside the home of the Reformed pastor László Tőkés on what was then Piața Maria. By 20 December the army had withdrawn and Timișoara declared itself the first free city in Romania, five days before Nicolae Ceaușescu's fall. The city held the European Capital of Culture title for 2023, shared with Veszprém and Eleusis. Timișoara was also the first city in continental Europe to install electric public street lighting, on 12 November 1884, four years after Wabash, Indiana switched on the world's first.