Volga
— — the slow water that carries a country.
Not only on a wall.
“The longest river in Europe, gathered out of the low Valdai Hills northwest of Moscow and let down 3,530 kilometres to the Caspian Sea. The Volga is wide and slow most of its length, broken into a chain of reservoirs behind Soviet-era dams, lined with old merchant cities — Yaroslavl, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Volgograd, Astrakhan. Frozen half the year above Kazan, soft and grey in summer, a river that drains the centre of a country. from the studio
Volga, 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.
The Volga is the longest river in Europe at 3,530 kilometres, draining a basin of about 1.36 million square kilometres — roughly a third of European Russia. It rises at 228 metres in the Valdai Hills west of Tver, runs east past Yaroslavl and Nizhny Novgorod, swings southeast at Kazan, then runs south past Samara, Saratov, and Volgograd before fanning into a 19,000-square-kilometre delta below Astrakhan and emptying into the Caspian Sea, 28 metres below sea level. Eight large hydroelectric dams built between 1932 and 1980 have turned most of its course into a chain of reservoirs.
The Volga is fed mostly by snowmelt, with the spring rise typically reaching its peak in April or early May and the river running highest from then through June. Before the dam-and-reservoir system, the spring flood could lift the water more than 14 metres at Astrakhan; the dams now hold most of that. Above Kazan the river freezes for about three months each winter, with ice cover from late November to early April. The Volga delta below Astrakhan is the largest river delta in Europe and a Ramsar wetland of international importance.
The river is at the centre of Russian cultural memory: the bargemen of Ilya Repin's 1873 painting, the merchant fairs of Nizhny Novgorod, the river-boats that still run Moscow-to-Astrakhan in summer. Volgograd, the old Stalingrad, holds the Mamayev Kurgan memorial above the river where the 1942-43 battle turned. Kazan, on the left bank where the river turns south, holds the Kremlin and the Kul Sharif mosque on the same hill. Roughly half of the population of Russia lives within the Volga basin, and most of the country's heavy industry sits along its banks.