Tomsk
— — the wooden lace the long winter keeps.
Not only on a wall.
“A Siberian university city of carved wooden houses, set on a bluff above the Tom about 250 kilometres northeast of Novosibirsk. Tomsk was founded in 1604 as a Russian frontier fort and grew on the strength of the trade road east; the railway, when it came, went south, and the centre kept its 19th-century scale. The carved facades along Krasnoarmeyskaya and Tatarskaya streets have been catalogued and slowly restored. Six universities. Long winters, late springs. — from the studio
Tomsk, 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.
Tomsk is a city of about 570,000 on the eastern bank of the Tom River in western Siberia, roughly 250 kilometres northeast of Novosibirsk. It was founded in 1604 by order of Boris Godunov as a Russian frontier fortress against the Yenisei Kyrgyz and grew through the 17th and 18th centuries as a stop on the Siberian Route, the overland road that connected European Russia with China. When the Trans-Siberian Railway was routed through Novosibirsk in the 1890s rather than Tomsk, the city's commercial growth slowed and the 19th-century wooden centre survived largely intact.
Tomsk is best known for its carved wooden architecture — locally called dereviannoye kruzhevo, wooden lace — concentrated along Krasnoarmeyskaya, Tatarskaya, and Kuznetsova streets and in the old Tatar Quarter. The most photographed houses include the Dragon House (1917, architect Vikentiy Orzheshko), the German House, and the Russian-Estate House on Krasnoarmeyskaya, all built in late-Imperial styles fusing Russian, Art Nouveau, and Siberian motifs. A municipal preservation programme begun in 2005 catalogued about 700 historically significant wooden buildings; restoration is partial and ongoing under tight budgets.
Tomsk runs on a hard continental cycle. January averages near minus 17 Celsius, with overnight lows below minus 30 not unusual; July averages near 19 Celsius. Snow holds the streets from early November through April, and the Tom typically freezes by mid-November. The city's six universities, anchored by Tomsk State (founded 1878 as the first university in Asian Russia) and Tomsk Polytechnic (1896), give the centre its rhythm: term begins in September, finals in late January, the long summer empties the dormitories. Roughly one in five residents is a student.