Tambov
— — a fortress town that became a piano town.
Not only on a wall.
“A provincial capital on the Tsna River, founded as a frontier fortress in 1636 and grown over four centuries into a city of long boulevards, onion domes, and pale stuccoed facades. The Cathedral of the Transfiguration holds the high ground above the river. Out in the countryside east of town, Rachmaninov spent his summers at the Ivanovka estate and wrote some of his best-known music there. The winters here are long and the snow holds the city's quiet. — from the studio
Tambov, 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.
Tambov is the administrative centre of Tambov Oblast in central European Russia, about 480 kilometres southeast of Moscow on the Tsna River, a left tributary of the Moksha. The city was founded in 1636 by order of Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich as a fortress on the Nogai frontier, anchoring the southern defensive line against Crimean Tatar raids. It sits at roughly 139 metres above sea level on the central Russian black-earth belt, and today carries a population of about 290,000 across a compact grid of nineteenth-century streets.
The skyline is held by the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Saviour, the city's mother church, begun in 1694 in the Naryshkin baroque style. Around it the centre is built of pale stuccoed brick from the nineteenth century, when Tambov grew rich on the chernozem grain trade. The Pokrovsky Cathedral and a handful of merchant mansions on Sovetskaya and Internatsionalnaya Streets survive from that period, and the riverfront promenade along the Tsna runs for roughly three kilometres below the cathedral hill.
Rachmaninov spent more than twenty summers at the Ivanovka estate, about 100 kilometres east of the city in the Uvarovo district, from the 1890s until the family left Russia in 1917. He wrote much of his Second and Third Piano Concertos there. The estate was destroyed in the civil war and rebuilt as a museum in the late Soviet period; an annual music festival held in his name draws visitors to the region every summer. The city itself observes its founding day in late April with concerts along the river.