Penza
— — a frontier town that became a quiet city.
Not only on a wall.
“A regional capital on the Sura River in the Volga uplands, about 630 kilometres southeast of Moscow. Founded in 1663 as a wooden fortress on the southern frontier of the Tsardom, it has settled into a slow provincial city of about 500,000, with pastel merchant houses along Moskovskaya Street, the long line of the Sura, and a painting school whose graduates ran half the Soviet art academies.
Penza, 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.
Penza sits on the Sura River in the Volga uplands of European Russia, about 630 kilometres southeast of Moscow and 350 kilometres west of Samara. It is the administrative centre of Penza Oblast, with a population of roughly 500,000. The city was founded in 1663 as a fortified outpost on the southern frontier of the Tsardom, defending against raids from the steppe. The Moscow-to-Kuibyshev railway reached the town in 1874, turning a regional market into an industrial centre. The Sura, a left tributary of the Volga, runs through the city east of the old centre.
The city's two most-cited dates are 1663 and 1898. The first is the founding charter, a wooden kremlin set above the Sura, garrisoned against Nogai and Crimean raids. The second is the founding of the Penza Art School by Konstantin Savitsky, the painter and director who shaped a generation of Russian Realist masters. The school still operates as the Savitsky Penza Art College. The Penza Picture Gallery, named for Savitsky, holds work by Aivazovsky, Repin, and Shishkin. The annual Sura festival marks the river through the warmer months.
Penza is reached most often by overnight train from Moscow's Kazansky station, a ride of about twelve hours. Penza-1 station sits at the south edge of the old city. Domestic flights connect through Penza Airport on the southwest side. The historic centre runs along Moskovskaya Street between Lenin Square and the Sura embankment. The Lermontov estate at Tarkhany, where the poet spent his childhood, is about 100 kilometres west and reachable by bus. Winters are long and cold; the river ices over by December most years.