Tolyatti
— — a city moved uphill to make room for a sea.
Not only on a wall.
“A planned Soviet city on the great bend of the Volga, named in 1964 for the Italian communist Palmiro Togliatti and built around the Lada factory two years later. The old town, Stavropol-on-Volga, lies under the Kuybyshev Reservoir. Across the water the Zhiguli Hills hold the river in a long curve. In summer, the embankment fills with families; in winter, the reservoir freezes thick enough to drive on.
Tolyatti, 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.
Tolyatti sits on the left bank of the Volga River in Samara Oblast, about 95 kilometres north-west of Samara, on the great northern arc the river makes around the Zhiguli Hills. The population is roughly 684,000, which makes it the most populous city in Russia without a metro system. It was founded in 1737 as Stavropol-on-Volga, relocated to higher ground in the 1950s when the Kuybyshev Reservoir was created, and renamed in 1964 after the Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti, who had died that summer at Yalta.
The Kuybyshev Reservoir, the largest by surface area in Europe, was filled between 1955 and 1957 behind the hydroelectric dam at Zhigulyovsk. About six thousand square kilometres of valley went under water, including old Stavropol. Tolyatti was rebuilt above the new shoreline, and today the embankment runs for kilometres along the reservoir's edge. The Zhiguli Hills, the only true uplands on the middle Volga, rise on the right bank across the water and give the city a horizon line most Russian river-cities lack.
The Volzhsky Automobile Plant, known as AvtoVAZ, broke ground in 1966 and rolled its first Lada off the line on 19 April 1970. Built in partnership with Fiat of Turin and based on the Fiat 124, it grew into the largest car factory in the Soviet Union and shaped the city around it. The Avtozavodsky District was laid out as a planned Soviet suburb for the workers; it remains the largest of Tolyatti's three districts and gives the city much of its mid-century scale.