Taganrog
— — the port Peter built and the boy Chekhov left.
Not only on a wall.
“A port town on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov, laid out by Peter the Great in 1698 as Russia's first purpose-built naval base. The streets fall toward the water in straight lines, an unusually orderly grid for a Russian city of its age. Anton Chekhov was born here in 1860, in a small whitewashed house on what is now Chekhov Street, and the town has kept his rooms more or less the way he knew them. The light over the bay is flat and silver.
Taganrog, 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.
Taganrog stands on a cape jutting into the Taganrog Bay, the northeastern arm of the Sea of Azov, in Rostov Oblast in southwestern Russia. Peter the Great founded the city in 1698 as the first home port of the Russian Imperial Navy, predating Saint Petersburg by five years. The grid of streets runs down to the harbour from a low bluff about 70 metres above the water. The city sits roughly 70 kilometres west of Rostov-on-Don and serves as the regional centre for the western coast of the Don delta.
The Sea of Azov is one of the shallowest seas in the world, with an average depth of about seven metres. Its low salinity comes from the Don and the Kuban, the two rivers that feed it. Off Taganrog the water turns flat and silver under a high sun, and the harbour ices over in cold winters. Peter's choice of the cape as a naval site rested on the long sand spit, the Taganrog Spit, that shelters the southern approach and gave the early fleet a defensible anchorage.
Anton Chekhov was born in Taganrog on 29 January 1860, the third of six children, in a small whitewashed house on what is now Chekhov Street. The house is preserved as a museum, along with the shop where his father sold groceries and the gymnasium where he studied. The Chekhov Literary Museum on Frunze Street holds his letters, photographs, and first editions. Together with the city library, which Chekhov endowed by sending books from his later homes, the Chekhov sites are the reason most travellers come.