Bratislava
— — a small capital under a four-towered castle.
Not only on a wall.
“Slovakia's capital sits on the north bank of the Danube where the river bends past the last spurs of the Little Carpathians. A four-towered castle holds the hill above the old town, looking south across the river toward the Austrian border less than five kilometres away. The lanes of the Staré Mesto carry coffeehouses, a coronation cathedral, and a long memory of being three things, Pressburg, Pozsony, and Bratislava, at once. from the studio
Bratislava, 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.
Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia, set on the north bank of the Danube at the foothills of the Little Carpathians. Its metropolitan area holds around 660,000 people. The city is uniquely placed at the meeting of three countries, Slovakia, Austria, and Hungary, with the Austrian border only about five kilometres west of the centre. Bratislava Castle, rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s after burning in 1811, anchors the skyline on a hill above the Old Town. It looks down on the river and across the water to the modernist Petržalka district on the south bank.
St Martin's Cathedral, completed in 1452, served as the coronation church of the Kingdom of Hungary from 1563 to 1830, while Buda was held by the Ottomans. Eleven Hungarian kings and queens, including Maria Theresa in 1741, were crowned beneath its vaults. The Old Town keeps its medieval grid around the Main Square and Michael's Gate, the last surviving tower of the 14th-century city walls. The Slavín memorial, raised in 1960 above the city, marks the graves of nearly 7,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the 1945 liberation of the town from German forces.
The Danube widens here as it leaves the Devín Gate, the gorge that splits the Little Carpathians from the Austrian Hainburg hills 10 kilometres upstream. The river forms the border with Austria for a short distance and then turns east toward Hungary. Devín Castle stands on a cliff at the confluence with the Morava River, on the western edge of the city, a site fortified since the Celtic and Roman periods. River cruises run downstream from the embankment near the SNP Bridge, the 1972 cable-stayed crossing whose UFO-shaped observation deck still defines the skyline.