Poltava
— — the field where a kingdom turned.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of orchards and white churches on a bluff above the Vorskla, central Ukraine. In June 1709 the meadow north of town held the battle that broke Swedish power and remade the map of eastern Europe. Walk that ground now and you find sunflowers, a memorial mound, and the rotunda above the river that locals call the White Gazebo. From the studio.
Poltava, 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.
Poltava sits on the high right bank of the Vorskla River in the central Ukrainian forest-steppe, capital of Poltava Oblast since 1937, with a population near 280,000. The old town climbs Ivanova Hill from the river up to a ring of nineteenth-century streets around Cathedral Square. Founded in the chronicles under the year 1174, the city took its modern shape after the 1709 battle that Peter the Great fought against Charles XII of Sweden a few kilometres to the north, and after Catherine II made it a regional centre.
The battle of 8 July 1709 ended Swedish hegemony in northern Europe. Peter I's army of roughly 45,000 defeated Charles XII's 25,000, killed or captured most of the Swedish field force, and reset the balance of the Great Northern War. The Russian victory monument and the Swedes' Grave both sit on the battlefield reserve north of the city, where the lines of the earthen redoubts have been traced in the open ground and marked with low stone obelisks.
The Battle of Poltava State History and Cultural Reserve covers the field, a 1909 bicentennial column, the museum, and small chapels marking troop positions. From the centre, the White Gazebo (Bila Altanka), a rotunda built in 1909, looks across the Vorskla floodplain. The pedestrian street Yevropeiska runs between Cathedral Square and the Korpusnyi Park fountain, lined with cafes serving Poltava halushky, the soft wheat-flour dumpling the city's name is half-jokingly tied to.