Kirov
— — the river city the toymakers kept warm.
Not only on a wall.
“An old river city on the upper Vyatka, founded in the twelfth century as Khlynov, renamed Vyatka, renamed Kirov in 1934. Half a million people, brick churches, painted Dymkovo clay figures still made by hand in a single workshop. From the studio, we see a city of long winters and long memory, the river bending past the cathedral, the lights of the embankment coming on early.
Kirov, 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.
Kirov is the administrative centre of Kirov Oblast in northeastern European Russia, on the right bank of the Vyatka River, about 800 kilometres east of Moscow. The population is roughly 500,000. The city was founded in 1181 as Khlynov by Novgorod settlers, renamed Vyatka in 1780 under Catherine II, and renamed again in 1934 for the assassinated Soviet party leader Sergei Kirov. Trans-Siberian trains pass through the central station, and the climate is sharply continental, with January mean temperatures near minus thirteen degrees Celsius and short, warm summers.
The old town carries a recognisable Russian profile: the white-walled Assumption Cathedral of the Trifonov Monastery, founded in 1580, sits on the high bank above the river. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century merchant houses line Spasskaya Street, now partly pedestrianised. The Alexander Garden, laid out in 1825 with a neoclassical rotunda overlooking the Vyatka, remains the city's central park. The 1937 Drama Theatre on Theatre Square is the largest of several Soviet-era civic buildings ringing the old central square.
Kirov is the home of the Dymkovo toy: small painted clay figures of women, animals, and riders, made in the riverside Dymkovo district since the early eighteenth century and still hand-built by a small group of artisans in a single workshop. The Great Vyatka Religious Procession, walked since 1657, leaves the city each June and covers about 150 kilometres to the village of Velikoretskoye and back, one of the longest continuously observed Orthodox pilgrimages in Russia.