Don
— — the river the Cossacks gave their name to.
Not only on a wall.
“The Don runs almost nineteen hundred kilometres south through wheat country and Cossack country, slow and wide for most of its length. It rises in the Central Russian Upland near Novomoskovsk and finishes at Rostov, where it widens into the Sea of Azov. The river has been worked, fought over, and written about for a thousand years. Sholokhov set his great novel on its banks. In winter it freezes; in summer the steppe along it goes gold. The painting holds the colour of that water against that grass.
Don, 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 Don is one of the major rivers of European Russia, running about 1,870 kilometres from its source near Novomoskovsk in the Central Russian Upland south and south-east through Voronezh and Volgograd Oblasts to its mouth at Rostov-on-Don on the Sea of Azov. Its drainage basin covers roughly 425,000 square kilometres of southern Russia and eastern Ukraine. The Volga–Don Canal, completed in 1952, connects the Don to the Volga and through it to the Caspian, giving the river system access to five seas. The Lower Don is navigable for shipping for most of its length.
The Don is a slow-moving lowland river, fed mostly by snowmelt in spring. It freezes through the winter from roughly late November to early April along its middle and upper reaches. Below the Tsimlyansk Reservoir, a 270-kilometre lake created by the Tsimlyansk Dam in 1952, the river broadens through the Don delta into the Sea of Azov. The water carries enough silt to feed one of the most productive grain regions in Russia. Fishing villages along the lower stretches still set nets for bream, pike-perch, and the diminishing population of sturgeon.
The Don is the homeland of the Don Cossacks, the largest Cossack host, whose villages along the river date from at least the sixteenth century. The river runs through Russian literature: Mikhail Sholokhov, born in the Cossack village of Veshenskaya in 1905, set his Nobel Prize-winning novel And Quiet Flows the Don on its banks. The city of Rostov-on-Don, the regional capital, holds about 1.1 million people and is the main port at the river's mouth. Upstream, Voronezh is the largest city on the middle Don. Steppe stretches east and west from the water in long open horizons.