Novi Sad
— — a fortress town the river bends around.
Not only on a wall.
“Novi Sad sits on the left bank of the Danube where the river slows and the Pannonian Plain opens north toward Hungary. On the right bank, the long honey-coloured walls of Petrovaradin Fortress climb up out of the water and never quite let go of the skyline. In town the streets are Habsburg-tidy, the cafes along Zmaj Jovina stay open late, and once a year in July the fortress fills with eighty-thousand people for the EXIT festival. The rest of the year the clock tower runs slow on purpose. — from the studio
Novi Sad, 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.
Novi Sad is the capital of the autonomous province of Vojvodina and the second-largest city in Serbia, with around 380,000 people in the urban area. It sits on the Danube about 75 kilometres northwest of Belgrade, where the river cuts between the Fruška Gora hills to the south and the flat farmland of the Bačka plain to the north. The city was founded in 1694 as a Serbian merchant settlement opposite the Habsburg fortress of Petrovaradin, and grew through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into a centre of Serbian cultural life — so much so that it was nicknamed the Serbian Athens. It was European Capital of Culture in 2022.
Petrovaradin Fortress is the city's signature. Built by the Habsburgs between 1692 and 1780 to a star-fort plan by the French engineer Sébastien Vauban's school, it covers 112 hectares above the Danube's right bank and held one of the strongest defensive positions in central Europe. Sixteen kilometres of underground galleries run beneath it, and the iconic clock tower on the upper rampart famously has its hour and minute hands reversed so river boatmen below could read the time at a distance. Inside the walls is a working district of artist studios, a museum, and the open ground that hosts the EXIT music festival each July.
The city's calendar pivots on the second weekend of July, when EXIT Festival takes over Petrovaradin Fortress. EXIT began in 2000 as a student protest movement against the Milošević government, became a music festival in 2001, and has drawn between 150,000 and 200,000 attendees over four nights in recent editions. It won Best Major European Festival at the European Festival Awards multiple times. Outside festival week the fortress returns to its quieter pace — Sunday markets at Ribarska Street, the Strand river beach across the bridge, and slow evenings on the cafe terraces around Trg Slobode under the neo-Gothic spire of the Name of Mary Church.