Petrozavodsk
— — the long blue hour the lake will not give up.
Not only on a wall.
“Capital of the Republic of Karelia on the western shore of Lake Onega, founded in 1703 as Peter the Great's ironworks. The Onega Embankment runs about a kilometre of sculpture given by sister cities: Duluth, Tübingen, La Rochelle, Joensuu, Varkaus. The white nights of late June leave the lake the colour of pewter at midnight, and the ferries to Kizhi Island leave from the same quay. from the studio
Petrozavodsk, 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.
Petrozavodsk is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Karelia in northwestern Russia, on the western shore of Lake Onega, with a population of about 280,000. It was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 as a state-run ironworks, the name itself a contraction of Petrovsky Zavod, Peter's factory. The city is the administrative, university, and ferry hub of Karelia and one of the main starting points for travel into the wooden-architecture sites of Russian Karelia and the White Sea coast.
Lake Onega is the second-largest lake in Europe by surface area, after Ladoga, at roughly 9,700 square kilometres. From the Petrozavodsk quay, summer hydrofoils run to Kizhi Island, the open-air museum of Karelian wooden architecture and the eighteenth-century Church of the Transfiguration, a 37-metre wooden church built without nails and on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1990. The Onega Embankment, the city's two-kilometre lakefront promenade, was laid out in the early 1990s.
Petrozavodsk sits above 61 degrees north, so high summer brings white nights from early June into mid-July: civil twilight rather than full dark, with the sky over the lake holding light past midnight. Winters are long and snow-locked, the lake freezing by December and breaking up in April. The aurora is visible from the city on clear winter nights during strong geomagnetic activity, more often the further north along the Karelian coast one travels.