Orenburg
— — a city built on the seam of two continents.
Not only on a wall.
“A frontier city on the Ural, set up in 1743 as the gateway from the Russian empire to the steppe. A pedestrian bridge crosses the river from one continent to the other in a hundred paces. In the markets, gossamer Orenburg shawls are sold by the gram, a square metre of them light enough to draw through a wedding ring. — from the studio
Orenburg, 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.
Orenburg stands on the Ural River in southern Russia, about 1,200 kilometres southeast of Moscow and close to the Kazakh border. The Ural is one of the conventional boundaries between Europe and Asia, and the city's pedestrian bridge crossing the river is marked with a stone monument noting the continental line. Founded in 1743 as a fortress town on the southern Orenburg frontier, the city now has roughly 570,000 residents. It serves as the capital of Orenburg Oblast and a hub for grain, gas, and rail traffic across the southern Urals.
The old centre keeps the grid of an eighteenth-century imperial fortress, laid out under Empress Anna's governor Ivan Neplyuev. Sovetskaya Street, the long pedestrian spine, runs past pastel merchant houses, the Karavan-Sarai mosque complex finished in 1846 for the Bashkir militia, and the brick gates of the old fortress. The Cathedral of Saint Nicholas, rebuilt after the Soviet years, holds the city's main relics. The pedestrian bridge across the Ural, opened in 1982 and rebuilt since, carries the painted line that says Europe on one bank and Asia on the other.
Orenburg is the home of the Orenburg shawl, a downy openwork wrap knitted from the under-fleece of the local goat. A finished wedding-ring shawl weighs under seventy grams in a square nearly two metres wide and can be drawn through a gold ring. Knitters have worked the craft in the surrounding villages since the eighteenth century, and the pattern was registered as a protected geographical indication. Winters here are long, often below minus twenty Celsius, and the shawl is as much daily clothing as it is craft. Summer markets along Sovetskaya keep them out year-round.