Syr Darya
— the slow brown river the mountains finally let go.
Not only on a wall.
“The Syr Darya enters Tajikistan from Kyrgyzstan, broadens through the Sughd region, and slips out toward Uzbekistan and the long road to the Aral Sea. In Tajikistan it is mostly a working river: cotton fields on the banks, the city of Khujand on a bend, the Kayrakkum reservoir holding back a piece of the Soviet century. The water carries the silt of the Tian Shan and the colour of late afternoon. from the studio
Syr Darya, 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.
The Syr Darya is the longer of the two great rivers of Central Asia, running about 2,212 kilometres from the Tian Shan mountains to the northern Aral Sea. It is born at the confluence of the Naryn and Kara Darya in eastern Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley, and from there enters Tajikistan's Sughd Region, where it crosses the Kayrakkum reservoir near Khujand. Khujand, the regional capital, sits on its left bank and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the river, founded over two thousand years ago.
The river's flow has been heavily worked. The Kayrakkum Dam, completed in 1956, created a reservoir of roughly 513 square kilometres that locals still call the Tajik Sea, and downstream the Farkhad Dam diverts water for the cotton fields of the Hungry Steppe. Since the 1960s, irrigation withdrawals have cut the river's delivery to the Aral Sea so sharply that the northern lobe is now sustained chiefly by the Syr Darya itself, behind the Kok-Aral dyke completed by Kazakhstan in 2005.