Kharkiv
— — the square that refused to empty.
Not only on a wall.
“Ukraine's second city, on the upper Kharkiv River, with one of the largest central squares in Europe at its heart. Constructivist apartment blocks ring Freedom Square in the long arc of the Derzhprom building, finished in 1928 and still standing through everything since. The city was the first capital of Soviet Ukraine, then a university town, then an industrial centre, and since 2022 a front-line city under regular long-range fire. People still walk the metro, the markets still open, the trams still run. The square holds.
Kharkiv, 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.
Kharkiv is Ukraine's second-largest city, with a pre-war population of about 1.4 million, in the northeast of the country roughly 40 kilometres from the Russian border. It sits at the confluence of the Lopan, Kharkiv, and Udy rivers on the edge of the East European Plain. Founded as a Cossack settlement in 1654, the city became a major imperial Russian university and industrial centre in the nineteenth century. Karazin Kharkiv National University, established in 1804, is one of the oldest in Eastern Europe and remains the city's academic anchor.
Freedom Square covers about 11.6 hectares and is among the largest city squares in Europe. Around its northern arc stands the Derzhprom, or State Industry Building, completed in 1928 to a constructivist design by Sergei Serafimov and his team. At thirteen stories it was the tallest building in the Soviet Union when it opened and is now a UNESCO World Heritage candidate. The square took heavy damage from a Russian missile strike in March 2022; the Derzhprom and the regional administration building behind it were both hit and partially restored under emergency works.
Kharkiv served as the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1919 to 1934, before the capital moved to Kyiv. The Holodomor of 1932-1933 fell heavily on the surrounding oblast. In the Second World War the city changed hands four times between 1941 and 1943 and was almost entirely destroyed. Reconstruction filled the centre with the wide Stalin-era boulevards still in use today. Since February 2022 the city has lived under sustained Russian missile and drone fire, with regular damage to housing, energy infrastructure, and university buildings.