Ufa
— — a city that holds two rivers at once.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Bashkortostan, set on a long ridge between two rivers in the southern Ural foothills. The Salavat Yulaev monument rides out over the Belaya, the white minarets of Lala Tulpan rise on the hill above, and the old wooden houses of the merchant quarter still stand in the streets behind Lenin Avenue. A Russian city with a Bashkir name and two languages in the street signs. — from the studio
Ufa, 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.
Ufa is the capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan, set on a long peninsular ridge between the Belaya and Ufa rivers in the southern foothills of the Ural Mountains, about 1,160 km east of Moscow. With roughly 1.1 million residents it is one of the larger cities of the Volga Federal District. The city was founded in 1574 as a Russian fortress on the boundary between forest and steppe and grew through the eighteenth century as an administrative seat for the Bashkir lands.
Two monuments anchor the city. The bronze equestrian statue of Salavat Yulaev, the eighteenth-century Bashkir poet and rebel, stands on a bluff above the Belaya river; cast in 1967 at nearly ten metres tall, it is among the largest equestrian sculptures in Russia. Up on Tukayev hill the white-stone Lala Tulpan mosque, completed in 1998, raises its two 53-metre minarets in the shape of unopened tulips. The merchant quarter behind Lenin Avenue still keeps blocks of nineteenth-century wooden houses with carved window frames.
Ufa International Airport lies 25 km south of the centre, with flights from Moscow Sheremetyevo in about two hours and twenty minutes. The Trans-Siberian Railway main line runs through Ufa station, with through-trains east toward Chelyabinsk and west to Samara and Moscow. The Salavat Yulaev monument and the Belaya river promenade below it are free and open at all hours; the National Museum of the Republic of Bashkortostan on Sovetskaya Street holds a small admission fee.