Zhytomyr
— — a granite city above the Teteriv.
Not only on a wall.
“A regional capital in the forested Polissia of north-central Ukraine, set on bluffs above the Teteriv river. Zhytomyr is older than its kingdom — the chronicles place a fortress here in 884. Granite outcrops break through the streets; the river bends below the old town in a tight horseshoe. Sergei Korolev, who built the Soviet space program, was born five blocks from the cathedral.
Zhytomyr, 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.
Zhytomyr is the administrative centre of Zhytomyr Oblast in north-central Ukraine, with a pre-2022 population near 261,000. It sits on the Teteriv river, a tributary of the Dnieper, about 140 kilometres west of Kyiv. The Polissia region around it is the country's largest forested zone — a low, granite-floored landscape of pine, peat, and slow water. The Old Castle hill above the river marks the site of the original fortress, first recorded in the chronicles in 884.
The Ukrainian Shield surfaces here. Zhytomyr is built on one of Europe's oldest exposed bedrocks, a band of Precambrian granite over two billion years old. Quarries at Korostyshiv and Lezhniv, twenty kilometres east, have shipped grey and pink stone across the former Soviet bloc; you find it in Kyiv's metro stations and Moscow's embankments. In the city itself the granite breaks through the river banks at the Hidropark and along the Teteriv canyon at Denyshi.
The Teteriv river runs 365 kilometres from the Volhynian Upland to the Dnieper, and its sharpest bend wraps around Zhytomyr. The water cuts through granite here, forming a small canyon at Denyshi twenty kilometres upstream where cliffs rise twenty metres above the surface. The river feeds the city's reservoir and the public beach at Hidropark. The monastery of the Holy Cross has stood on the bluff above the bend, in one form or another, since the early 18th century.