Zaporizhzhia
— — the river that gave the Cossacks their name.
Not only on a wall.
“The Dnipro widens here, and in the middle of it lies Khortytsia, the long wooded island that, from the 16th century, held the Cossack Sich. The city of Zaporizhzhia grew on the eastern bank, behind the river, and around the great dam built across the rapids in the 1930s. The war has been close since 2022. The island and the river were here long before either.
Zaporizhzhia, 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.
Zaporizhzhia is a city of about 700,000 people on the Dnipro River in southeastern Ukraine, capital of Zaporizhzhia Oblast. The name means 'beyond the rapids', a reference to the cataracts that once broke the river here, submerged in 1932 by the reservoir of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station. The historic core of the city is Khortytsia Island, a 12-kilometre wooded island in the middle of the river and the largest river island in Ukraine. The modern city was founded as the Russian fortress of Aleksandrovsk in 1770 and renamed Zaporizhzhia in 1921.
The Dnipro is the fourth-longest river in Europe, rising in the Valdai Hills of Russia and running 2,200 kilometres south to the Black Sea. At Zaporizhzhia it once carved a series of nine major rapids through granite bedrock, the porohy that gave the city its name and the Cossacks their refuge. The rapids were drowned in 1932 by the reservoir behind the DniproHES dam, a 760-megawatt hydroelectric station built across the river just downstream of Khortytsia Island. The dam has held, with damage, through the war that began in February 2022.
Khortytsia Island has been the symbolic heart of the Zaporozhian Cossacks since the 16th century, when Dmytro Vyshnevetsky built a fortress on it in 1556. From here the Cossack Host raided south against the Crimean Khanate, served as a frontier military estate of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and developed the self-governing Sich that defined Ukrainian Cossack identity until 1775. The island is now the Khortytsia National Reserve. The Museum of Zaporozhian Cossacks and the reconstructed Zaporozhian Sich open-air museum stand at the northern end, above the river.