Sakhalin
— — an island the maps could never quite agree on.
Not only on a wall.
“A long, thin island in the Sea of Okhotsk, 948 kilometres from north to south, lying just off the Russian mainland and a ferry-crossing north of Japan. Chekhov sailed here in 1890 to write about the penal colony; the south was Japanese Karafuto until 1945. The salmon rivers feed the Pacific and the winters bury the coast in drift ice. The forests run unbroken for hours.
Sakhalin, 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.
Sakhalin is a long, narrow island in the Sea of Okhotsk off the Russian Far East, separated from Hokkaidō to the south by the 42-kilometre La Pérouse Strait. The island runs about 948 kilometres from north to south and never wider than 160 kilometres, with a total area of roughly 72,500 square kilometres. Its capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, sits in the southern third and holds about 200,000 of the island's roughly 460,000 residents. The southern half was the Japanese prefecture of Karafuto from 1905 until 1945, when the Soviet Union took the whole island.
Most of Sakhalin remains roadless boreal forest of larch, spruce, and birch, with brown bear populations the Russian Geographical Society estimates above 3,500. The northern coast looks across the Strait of Tartary to the Russian mainland and can be reached by a winter ice road in some years. Indigenous Nivkh communities still fish the lower Amur estuary and the Pacific salmon runs that come up the Tym and Poronay rivers in late summer. The interior holds villages a day's drive apart, linked by gravel and rail.
Anton Chekhov sailed to Sakhalin in 1890 to document the tsarist penal colony, riding across Siberia by horse and steamer before publishing his book 'Sakhalin Island' in 1895. The south of the island became Japanese Karafuto after the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth, with a settler population that reached roughly 400,000 by 1941. In August 1945 Soviet forces took the prefecture in a two-week campaign; the Japanese civilians were repatriated by 1949. The Chekhov Museum in Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsky still stands in the house where he stayed.