Samara
— — a city that turns its long face to the river.
Not only on a wall.
“Samara sits where the Volga makes its great eastward bend and meets the smaller Samara River, with the Zhiguli Hills rising in low chalky ridges on the far bank. The embankment runs more than four kilometres along the water, the longest in Russia, with sand beaches busy from June into September. A turn-of-the-century centre of timber merchant houses and Style Moderne facades climbs gently away from the river. Long winters, broad summer light, and the slow brown current carrying everything south toward the Caspian. from the studio
Samara, 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.
Samara is the administrative centre of Samara Oblast in southeastern European Russia, with roughly 1.16 million residents along the eastern bank of the Volga at the river's great bend. The city was founded in 1586 as a frontier fort to guard the Volga trade and grew through the nineteenth century into a grain and timber port. During the Second World War it was the wartime reserve capital under the name Kuybyshev, and Stalin's underground bunker, built in 1942 to a depth of 37 metres, still sits beneath the city. Samara is also the historical home of the Russian space programme, where the Soyuz rockets are built.
The Volga at Samara is broad and slow, roughly two kilometres across in places, and the city's main river embankment stretches more than four kilometres of paved promenade, ornamental fountains, and sand beaches. It is the longest river embankment in Russia. Across the water, the Zhiguli Mountains rise to about 380 metres in a low chalk-and-limestone ridge that forms the Samara Bend, the only sharp turn the Volga makes in its 3,500-kilometre run to the Caspian. The bend is protected as Samarskaya Luka National Park, established in 1984, and Zhigulevsky Nature Reserve.
The old town climbing from the river holds one of the best surviving collections of Russian Style Moderne in the country. The Kurlina mansion of 1903 by Alexander Zelenko, with its lilac art-nouveau facade and bow-window, opens to the public as a small museum. Several blocks south, the brick neo-gothic Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart from 1906 sits opposite Strukovsky Park. The grain-merchant houses along Kuibysheva Street have been carefully restored; many keep their original carved wooden doors. The Drama Theatre on Square of Glory, finished in 1888, is sometimes called the gingerbread house for its red-and-cream brickwork.