Makhachkala
— — where the Caucasus stops at the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Dagestan, set on a narrow shelf of land between the Caspian Sea and the slope of Tarki-Tau mountain. A young city by Caucasian standards, founded in 1844 as a Russian fort. Around 600,000 people live here, more than thirty languages are spoken in the republic, and the seafront market runs strong from May into October. The mountains rise visibly to the west.
Makhachkala, 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.
Makhachkala lies on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, where the eastern Caucasus mountains end at the coastal plain. It is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Dagestan, a federal subject of Russia, with a population of roughly 600,000. The city was founded in 1844 as the Russian military fortification of Petrovskoye and renamed in 1921 after the Dagestani revolutionary Makhach Dakhadayev. Dagestan is the most ethnically diverse republic in the Russian Federation, with more than thirty officially recognised languages spoken across its mountain valleys and coastal plain.
The Caspian Sea reaches Makhachkala as a long, shallow shelf along the city's eastern edge. The promenade and the city beach run for several kilometres south of the port. The Caspian is the largest enclosed body of water on earth, brackish rather than fresh, and the only home of the Beluga sturgeon. From the seafront on a clear day the mountains rise visibly to the west; Tarki-Tau, the long ridge above the city, reaches around 720 metres and carries the old Kumyk village of Tarki on its lower slope.
Makhachkala has a warmer climate than most of Russia. Summers run hot and humid with sea breezes off the Caspian; winters are mild for the latitude, with average January temperatures hovering near freezing. The seafront bazar runs strongest from May into October. The city is the railhead for Derbent, the ancient walled town 120 kilometres south on the same coast — older than Makhachkala by nearly two thousand years and itself a UNESCO World Heritage site listed in 2003. Sulak Canyon, one of the deepest in the world, lies inland to the west.