Yekaterinburg
— — the city where Europe ends and Asia begins.
Not only on a wall.
“The fourth city of Russia, set along the Iset River where the Ural mountains taper into the Siberian plain. An obelisk west of town marks the continental boundary; you can stand with one foot in each half of the world. Yekaterinburg is a working city of factories, theatres, and conservatoires, and the place where the last Romanovs were held and killed in 1918. The Church on the Blood stands on that ground now, gold-domed against the long winter light. from the studio
Yekaterinburg, 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.
Yekaterinburg sits on the Iset River on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains, about 1,400 kilometres east of Moscow, and serves as the administrative centre of Sverdlovsk Oblast. The city was founded in 1723 by Vasily Tatishchev and Georg Wilhelm de Gennin as an ironworks town under Peter the Great, and named for his wife, the future Empress Catherine I. With a population near 1.5 million it is Russia's fourth-largest city and the unofficial capital of the Urals. A roadside obelisk roughly forty kilometres west marks the conventional boundary between Europe and Asia.
The Church on the Blood was consecrated in 2003 on the site of the Ipatiev House, where Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, their five children, and four members of their household were shot in the basement on the night of 16-17 July 1918. The original house was demolished by the Soviet authorities in 1977 on the orders of Boris Yeltsin, then the regional party first secretary. The replacement church is built in the Russian-Byzantine style, with five gold domes that read warm against the city's long grey winter.
Yekaterinburg sits in a sharply continental climate. January averages near minus fourteen Celsius and July averages near nineteen, a swing of more than thirty degrees across the year. Snow holds the city from November through March, and the Iset freezes solid enough to walk on. The Voynich treatment leans into that polarity: the gold domes against deep cold-weather blue, the white of the river under the white of the sky. The summer city, brief and bright, is its own different painting.