Cherkasy
— — a river city that holds the country's middle.
Not only on a wall.
“Cherkasy sits on the right bank of the Dnipro, two hundred kilometres downstream of Kyiv, where the river widens into the Kremenchuk Reservoir. The city climbs from the water in long terraces, with the old town above and the pine woods of Sosnovyi Bir running along the shore. Cossack history is the bone of the place: the name itself comes from the Cherkasy regiment that helped raise Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the seventeenth century. Sunset over the reservoir is long and unhurried. The pines smell of resin in summer; the river ices in.
Cherkasy, 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.
Cherkasy is the administrative centre of Cherkasy Oblast in central Ukraine, with a population of roughly 270,000 before the full-scale invasion. It lies on the high right bank of the Dnipro about 190 kilometres south-southeast of Kyiv, at the head of the Kremenchuk Reservoir, the large impoundment built in 1959 above the Kremenchuk Hydroelectric Power Station. The name is first recorded in chronicles of the early fourteenth century and is bound up with the Cherkasy Cossack regiment, one of the founding units of the Zaporozhian Host.
The Dnipro at Cherkasy is wide and slow, more inland sea than river. The Kremenchuk Reservoir reaches roughly 28 kilometres across at its widest and runs about 149 kilometres along the old riverbed; the city's shore frames the upper end. A long pedestrian and rail bridge crosses to the left bank near the Sosnovyi Bir pine woods. In summer the reservoir holds beaches and small craft; in winter it ices over hard enough to fish on. The sunsets are unhurried and the colour of the water turns slate toward dusk.
The city sits in the dnieper-Ukraine forest-steppe and runs through a full continental year. Winters are cold, with average January temperatures around minus five Celsius and the reservoir freezing along its banks. Spring is short. Summers are warm, around 22 Celsius in July, and the pine woods at Sosnovyi Bir, planted along the western shore, hold the heat in resin. The Cherkasy Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University and the Kobzar Museum in nearby Kaniv anchor the year's cultural calendar, with Shevchenko commemorations every May on the bluff above the river.