Tyumen
— — the first Russian town beyond the mountains.
Not only on a wall.
“The oldest Russian settlement in Siberia, founded in 1586 on a high bank above the Tura River, where the steppe road from the Urals turned toward the Irtysh. For four centuries it was a way-station for traders, exiles, and tea caravans coming overland from China. The discovery of West Siberian oil and gas in the 1960s rebuilt the city around it, and the long main streets now mix nineteenth-century merchant houses, wooden window-frame carving, and post-Soviet glass. Hot springs run year-round in the floodplain outside town. Winters are long and clean and very cold.
Tyumen, 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.
Tyumen sits on the Tura River in southwestern Siberia, a tributary of the Tobol, about 2,100 kilometres east of Moscow and just east of the Ural Mountains. It was founded in 1586 by order of Tsar Feodor I as the first Russian fortified settlement in Siberia, on the site of an older Tatar town called Chimgi-Tura. The city is the administrative centre of Tyumen Oblast, which extends north into the West Siberian Plain and contains some of the world's largest oil and gas fields. The population today is roughly 850,000, making it one of Siberia's largest cities.
The old centre of Tyumen still carries the merchant city of the nineteenth century: stuccoed two-storey houses along Republiki Street, the Holy Trinity Monastery on the riverbank dating to 1616, and a small district of wooden houses whose window frames carry the deep relief carving Siberia is known for. The newer city was rebuilt outward from the centre after 1965, when the Samotlor oil field came online about 700 kilometres north and turned Tyumen into the administrative hub of West Siberian energy. Glass towers along the Tura now stand beside the older brick of the merchant quarter.
Winter is the long season. From November through March the daytime high often sits below minus ten Celsius, with January averages around minus seventeen. Snow holds the ground from late October to April. Summer is short and warm, with July highs into the mid-twenties Celsius and long northern light that lingers past ten in the evening. The thermal springs in the floodplain outside town, which draw water from deep aquifers at a steady forty-plus Celsius, run all winter and are most striking on the coldest days, when the steam rises in columns.