Omsk
— — a river city the winter holds for half the year.
Not only on a wall.
“A million-and-some city on the Irtysh, where the smaller Om runs in from the east. Founded in 1716 as a Cossack fort on the steppe edge. Dostoyevsky did four years here in the prison camp and wrote the city back later. Long winters, short bright summers, the river under ice from November to April. A place that holds.
Omsk, 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.
Omsk is a city of about 1.1 million people in western Siberia, at the confluence of the Om and Irtysh rivers, roughly 2,200 kilometres east of Moscow along the Trans-Siberian Railway. It is the administrative centre of Omsk Oblast and the second-largest city in the Siberian Federal District after Novosibirsk. Founded in 1716 as a Cossack fortress on the southern Siberian steppe frontier, it grew through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an administrative seat and exile destination. The city sits at about 87 metres elevation on the flat Western Siberian Plain.
Omsk has a sharp continental climate with long, dry winters and short, warm summers. Average January temperatures sit around minus 17 degrees Celsius, with cold snaps reaching well below minus 30. The Irtysh freezes solid from early November into mid-April; the river ice on both the Irtysh and the Om is part of the city's daily geography for nearly half the year. July averages near plus 20 degrees Celsius, with long northern light. Annual precipitation is low, around 400 millimetres, falling mostly as summer rain and dry winter snow.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky served four years of penal labour in the Omsk fortress from 1850 to 1854, sentenced for his involvement with the Petrashevsky Circle in Saint Petersburg. The experience became the basis of his novel The House of the Dead, published in 1862. A small Dostoyevsky museum now occupies a building near the former commandant's quarters in the old city centre, on Dostoyevskogo Street. The Assumption Cathedral, demolished in 1935 and rebuilt between 2005 and 2007, anchors Cathedral Square nearby. Omsk State University and the regional drama theatre frame the same downtown blocks.