Dnipro
— — a city the river curves to meet.
Not only on a wall.
“The fourth-largest city in Ukraine, set where the Dnieper makes a long slow bend. The Embankment runs nearly thirty kilometres along the water, longer than any other in Europe. There are chestnut trees the colour of brass in October, and a Menorah Center that holds a city's memory. The river has carried boats and steel and grief, and keeps carrying.
Dnipro, 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.
Dnipro sits on the right bank of the Dnieper River in central-eastern Ukraine, the administrative centre of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. The city was founded in 1776 by Catherine II as Yekaterinoslav and renamed in 2016 to honour the river. Roughly 960,000 people live across the seven raions that climb the hills above the water. The Dnieper, Europe's fourth-longest at about 2,200 kilometres, divides the city into right- and left-bank halves linked by long bridges; the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station lies upstream at Zaporizhzhia.
The Dnieper here is wide and slow, a working river that has carried wheat, iron, and the freight of empires since the time of the Kyivan Rus. The Naberezhna Peremohy runs about thirty kilometres along the right bank, often cited as the longest river embankment in Europe, lined with chestnut and poplar. Sandbanks called Monastyrskyi and Komsomolskyi sit mid-stream, and herring gulls drift down from the Dnieper Reservoir behind the dam at Kamianske. In summer the water turns the colour of weak tea where the silt settles.
The city's spine is Yavornytskoho Avenue, a kilometre-and-a-half boulevard of Constructivist and Stalin-era stone running from the Cathedral of the Transfiguration to the central train station. The Menorah Center, completed in 2012, is one of the largest Jewish community complexes in the world, anchored to the historic Choral Synagogue. Higher up the hill sit the rocket-design bureaus of the Yuzhmash plant, which built Soviet ICBMs and now civilian launch vehicles. The granite of the embankment was quarried at Kryvyi Rih, two hours west.