Tula Arms Plant
— — the city that has made its own weapons for three hundred years.
Not only on a wall.
“The oldest arms works in Russia, set into the bend of the Upa where Peter the Great put it in 1712. The river still runs past the brick walls and the long workshop roofs. The city grew up around the plant: samovars and gingerbread on one side of the kremlin, gunsmiths on the other. The work has never stopped here.
Tula Arms Plant, 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.
Tula sits 193 kilometres south of Moscow in Tula Oblast, on the banks of the Upa River where it meets the Tulitsa. The arms plant was established by decree of Peter the Great in February 1712, organising the gunsmiths who had already worked the city since the sixteenth century. Three centuries on, the works still occupy the same riverside ground, and the city of roughly 460,000 has grown around it. Samovars and gingerbread to the east, weapons to the west, with the kremlin holding the centre.
The Tula Kremlin, finished in 1520 under Vasily III, is the oldest stone fortress south of Moscow and the visual anchor of the old town. Its nine towers and a kilometre of curtain wall enclose two cathedrals; the brick is the same warm red that runs through the arms works a short walk west along the river. The plant's nineteenth-century workshops keep the same palette: long horizontal sheds, narrow industrial windows, brick darkened by two hundred years of weather and use.
The Tula State Museum of Weapons traces its collection to 1724, when Peter the Great ordered notable pieces preserved from each year's production. Its current home, opened in 2012 on the right bank of the Upa, is shaped like an old Russian helmet and holds more than 14,000 items across five floors. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday; the arms plant itself remains a working factory and is not visited, but the kremlin grounds and the museum together give a clear reading of why the city is what it is.