Voronezh
— — the river that built a navy.
Not only on a wall.
“Voronezh stands on its namesake river in the black-earth country southwest of Moscow. Peter the Great built the first ships of the Russian regular navy here in the 1690s, on the riverbank, for the campaign against the Ottomans at Azov. The city was nearly destroyed in the winter of 1942 and rebuilt in the years after. A reservoir holds the river in a long sheet of water in front of the city now.
Voronezh, 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.
Voronezh stands on the high right bank of the Voronezh River, a few kilometres above its confluence with the Don, in the black-earth region of southwestern Russia. It was founded in 1586 as a fortified outpost on the steppe frontier. The modern city holds roughly one million residents and serves as the administrative centre of Voronezh Oblast. The Voronezh Reservoir, completed in 1972, holds the river in a broad sheet of water along the city centre, about thirty kilometres long.
Between 1696 and 1711, Peter the Great built the first ships of the Russian regular navy on the Voronezh riverbank, including the line-of-battle ship Goto Predestinatsia, launched in 1700. The shipyards supplied the Azov campaigns against the Ottoman Empire. The river was deeper and faster then; the Voronezh Reservoir, dammed in 1972, raised the water level in front of the city and turned a working river into a still one. A replica of Goto Predestinatsia is moored at the city embankment as a museum ship.
The Annunciation Cathedral on Revolution Prospect was completed in 2009 and rises roughly 97 metres, among the tallest Russian Orthodox churches and the seat of the Voronezh and Liski Diocese. It replaced an older cathedral demolished under Soviet rule in 1929. The Alekseyevsko-Akatov Monastery, founded in 1620 with a surviving belltower from 1674, is the oldest stone structure in the city. Most of the centre is post-war reconstruction; the front line ran through these streets from July 1942 to January 1943, and roughly ninety percent of the buildings were destroyed.