Bila Tserkva
— a white church and a park three centuries old.
Not only on a wall.
“A city on the Ros River, about eighty kilometres south of Kyiv, named for the white church that once stood on its hill. At its edge sits Oleksandriya Park, a 297-hectare landscape garden laid out in 1793 by Countess Aleksandra Branicka and her landscape architect Dionizy Miclair. Old oaks, stone pavilions, a Roman colonnade above a pond. The river bends slowly through the southern districts.
Bila Tserkva, 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.
Bila Tserkva, Ukrainian for 'white church', is the largest city in Kyiv Oblast outside the capital, with a population of about 200,000 on the Ros River roughly 80 kilometres south of Kyiv. The city traces its founding to the eleventh century, when Yaroslav the Wise built a fortress called Yuriev here in 1032. The Polish-Lithuanian Branicki family held the estate from the late eighteenth century, and their landscape garden, Oleksandriya Park, is now the central public space of the city.
Oleksandriya Park covers 297 hectares along the Ros River at the south-western edge of the city, designed in the romantic English landscape style with broad meadows, oak alleys, and built follies in the manner of Stowe and Versailles. The Echo colonnade, a semi-circular Doric arcade above the central pond, returns spoken words across the water from forty metres away. Two-hundred-year-old oaks line the central allée. The park is open all year and remains the quietest place in the city after the first frost.
The park entrance is on Stavyshchanska Street at the south-western edge of the city; entry was set at around 60 hryvnia for adults at the most recent published rate, with reductions for students. Bila Tserkva is reached from Kyiv by the H01 highway or by suburban train from Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi, roughly an hour and a half each way. The Branicki Palace itself was destroyed in the twentieth century; only the park, its colonnade, pavilions, and grotto survive of the original estate complex.