Jesus on the sea of Tiberias

Country: Spain

Manufactory: Lladro

Date of establishment: 1984

Sculptor: Salvador Furió

Size (cm): 54*76

Limited Series

Porcelain Story

I have visited Israel many times. As part of various delegations. On creative and tourist trips. By invitation and even without invitation. Israel is generally one of the few countries in which you encounter miracles literally at every step. And, no, you certainly don’t get used to them, because it’s simply impossible to get used to miracles, otherwise they cease to be miracles (or they are not miracles at all). But there are so many of them that you start looking for an explanation for this. At least for myself. I'm made that way.

I started looking. And often, to my surprise, I found. I won't talk about everything at once. I hope that I will have the opportunity, presenting other porcelain compositions, to tell about the amazing cases that happened to me in different regions of Israel. Now I would like to dwell on one of my first trips to this unique country. Because it was in memory of this journey that I acquired this composition.

In that short journalistic trip, everything was scheduled by the hour. And literally at every point of the rich program, we got acquainted with something absolutely incredible. With the life of the Bedouins, for example, spending days and nights in the scorching Negev desert, despite the fact that many of them have beautiful apartments in modern houses with all amenities. With a naive socialist way of life in a kind of Jewish collective farms, which are called kibbutzim there. In them, everyone lives according to the principle familiar to us since Soviet times: from each according to his abilities - to each according to his needs ... Or vice versa, I don’t even remember. Something else struck me. Having created collective farms on rocky-sandy land, kibbutzniks carried out drip irrigation for every tree and even bush! There, for the first time in my life, I tasted the sweetest seedless watermelon. “Have you tried to grow boneless fish?” I tried to joke clumsily. In response, they thought about it and in all seriousness said that they simply had not tried it yet ...

So, it turned out that among the first organizers of the kibbutz were Jewish Cossacks from Ukrainian villages who moved to Palestine from the Soviet Union!

We had to leave the next day. And Misha Frenkel and I from then popular Ukrainian newspaper "Komsomolskoye Znamya" decided to go to relatives in the city of Ashdod for one night. The driver of the minibus from Jerusalem to Ashdod was driving at an average speed of 120-130 kilometers per hour. We asked this reckless Arab guy not to rush in vain. He was relentless...

At the entrance to Ashdod, behind a small humpbacked bridge, a sharp turn began, which the driver slipped in the pitch darkness of the night ... I later saw this incredible story many times (from above!) in a dream: a minibus, spinning like a spinning top (but not turning over!), irresistibly approaching a cliff that goes into darkness, limited only by a few white columns ...

And suddenly something inexplicable happens. When one of the front wheels is already over the cliff, the bus stops in its tracks. As if some unknown force at the last moment with its mighty hand held him back.

I know whom I have to thank for this salvation. I knew this before. And my words of gratitude, uttered many times and every day, mean nothing, except for a kind of ritual. The main thing is that over the years I understood HOW to thank... But that's a completely different story.