Chita
— — a railway town where the long winter holds the light.
Not only on a wall.
“A Trans-Siberian city at the confluence of the Chita and Ingoda rivers, ringed by the Yablonovy range. Wooden houses with carved window frames sit beside Soviet apartment blocks and the gold-domed Kazan Cathedral. Winters press to forty below; summers go warm and brief along the lake shore at Kenon. The Decembrists were exiled here in the 1820s, and the streets still carry their names.
Chita, 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.
Chita is the administrative centre of Zabaykalsky Krai in southeastern Siberia, about 6,200 kilometres east of Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The city sits at the confluence of the Chita and Ingoda rivers, in a basin enclosed by the Yablonovy Mountains, at roughly 650 metres above sea level. Population is around 325,000. Founded as a Cossack winter settlement in 1653, it grew under the Russian Empire as an exile destination and later as a railway junction. The Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God anchors the central square.
The year in Chita turns on a hard continental cycle. January averages around -25°C, and the long winter regularly drops below -40°C, with the Ingoda freezing solid into a road. The brief summer brings short, hot afternoons and warm evenings along Lake Kenon to the west of the city, where families swim from June through August. Spring is a dust season; autumn is the gold of larch and birch, sharp and short. The Orthodox calendar marks the year, from Christmas in January to Trinity Sunday in early summer.
The Decembrists, Russian officers who rose against Tsar Nicholas I in 1825, were marched east to Chita the following year and held in the wooden prison still preserved as the Decembrists' Church museum. Their wives followed, building the first European parlours in the town. Streets in the old quarter still carry the names Stolypin, Anokhin, and Bekketov. Beyond the rail yards, the taiga opens to a silence broken mostly by freight: the Trans-Siberian moves about 100 million tonnes a year, and the long whistles mark the hours from outside the city.