Ipatiev House
— the room the century turned in.
Not only on a wall.
“The merchant's house on Voznesensky Hill where the last Romanovs were held in the spring and summer of 1918. The building stood until 1977, when it was levelled on order of the local party. On the same ground now rises the Church on the Blood of All Saints, consecrated in 2003. Pilgrims arrive on the night of 16 July and walk the twenty-one kilometres to Ganina Yama by morning.
Ipatiev House, 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 Ipatiev House stood at the corner of Voznesensky Prospekt in Yekaterinburg, a regional capital in the central Urals about 1,800 kilometres east of Moscow. Built in the 1880s by a mining engineer and acquired by the merchant Nikolai Ipatiev in 1908, it was requisitioned in April 1918 and renamed the House of Special Purpose. Tsar Nicholas II, Alexandra, their five children, and four attendants were held there from 30 April until 17 July 1918, when they were shot in the basement before dawn.
The house was demolished in September 1977 on instructions from the Politburo, carried out under the local first secretary Boris Yeltsin, who later wrote that he had received the order from Moscow and was given no room to refuse. The site was paved over and remained vacant for two decades. Foundations of the Church on the Blood were laid in 2000; the cathedral, sixty metres tall under a gilded central dome, was consecrated on 16 July 2003 by Patriarch Alexy II.
The Church on the Blood stands at Tolmacheva 34, open daily and free to enter. The lower church marks the approximate site of the basement room and holds a continuous reading of the psalter. Each year on the night of 16 to 17 July a procession of tens of thousands walks from the cathedral to the Romanov burial pit at Ganina Yama, twenty-one kilometres north of the city, arriving by sunrise for the Divine Liturgy at the wooden monastery on the site.