Prizren
— — a town the river runs through the middle of.
Not only on a wall.
“A town in the southern Balkans laid across both banks of the Bistrica, with the stone arch of the old bridge holding the two sides together. Above the river the Kaljaja fortress watches from its hill; below, the Sinan Pasha Mosque has held the sky over the bazaar since 1615. Trout, lime trees, and the call to prayer answering church bells across the water.
Prizren, 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.
Prizren sits in a wide valley below the Šar Mountains in the southern Balkans, on both banks of the Bistrica river. The town has roughly 95,000 residents and is built around the bazaar quarter on the south bank and the residential climb up toward Kaljaja fortress on the north. The fortress hill rises to about 525 metres above sea level and commands the valley south toward the Albanian border. The League of Prizren, the late-Ottoman Albanian nationalist movement, was founded in the town in June 1878 and is regarded as the origin of modern Albanian political identity.
The Sinan Pasha Mosque has stood at the centre of Prizren since 1615, commissioned by an Ottoman official from local stone and crowned by a single 14-metre dome. The Church of Our Lady of Ljeviš, a few streets north, was rebuilt as a five-domed Byzantine church in 1306 over earlier foundations and carries frescoes from the school of King Milutin's court painters. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2006 as part of the Medieval Monuments in Kosovo serial site. The old stone bridge over the Bistrica is late Ottoman.
The Bistrica river runs out of the Šar Mountains north of town and drops through the centre of Prizren in a stone-banked channel narrow enough to talk across. Cafés crowd both sides, with chairs set down to the waterline in the warm months. The river feeds the Drini i Bardhë, the White Drin, below town, which carries water onward to the Adriatic through the Drin and the Bojana. Trout run through the upper reaches in spring and locals fish the headwaters on warm-month weekends above the old water-mills.