Khmelnytskyi
— — a quiet city that kept its name twice.
Not only on a wall.
“A regional capital in the Podilia uplands, set where the Southern Bug bends through low chalk country. The city has been Płoskirów, then Proskuriv, then Khmelnytskyi since 1954, when it took the name of the Cossack hetman whose seventeenth-century campaigns crossed this part of the steppe. Today it is a market town in a country at war, far from the front, full of trolleybuses, courtyard linden trees, and a Sunday produce bazaar that goes back generations. — from the studio
Khmelnytskyi, 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.
Khmelnytskyi is the administrative centre of Khmelnytskyi Oblast in western Ukraine, sitting on the Southern Bug river roughly 340 km southwest of Kyiv. The city holds a population of about 270,000 and was known as Proskuriv until 1954, when Soviet authorities renamed it for the seventeenth-century Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Its older name, Płoskirów, dates back to a 1493 Polish-Lithuanian charter. The surrounding Podilia plateau is fertile loess country, and the city itself rests at around 279 metres above sea level on the chalk uplands that drain south toward the Black Sea basin.
The city's calendar still turns on its open-air markets. The central Yarmarka and the Sunday produce bazaar on Kamianetska Street are among the largest wholesale clothing and goods markets in central Europe, drawing buyers from across western Ukraine. Summer brings sour cherries and apricots from the Podilia orchards; autumn brings buckwheat, pumpkins, and the first jars of pickled tomatoes. City Day is celebrated each September, marking the 1431 first mention of Płoskirów. Since 2022 the rhythm has changed under wartime conditions, but the markets, the linden-shaded courtyards, and the river walk along the Bug still set the week.
Khmelnytskyi sits well west of the front line, roughly 800 km from the Donbas, and has remained one of the calmer regional capitals through the war. That distance shapes the texture of the place: the trolleybuses still run on the original 1970 network, the courtyard maples still drop their leaves on schedule, and the city hosts displaced families from the east who arrived in 2022 and stayed. The Bug river park, the Shevchenko monument, and the old central square anchor an everyday quiet that is not stillness exactly — more the held breath of a city that has chosen to keep functioning.