Ceramicist and founder
Anastasia Guzikova
Surya Temple is a tea house and a ceramic studio sharing one room in Paphos, which means the cup you drink from was almost certainly made a few metres from where you are sitting. It is run by one person, and that is deliberate.
Anastasia has been throwing pots for eleven years and drinking tea properly for longer than that. Surya Temple began as a wheel in a spare room and a shelf of tea she could not stop buying.
The room
The room is at Christou Aristodimou 1.
The front half is the tea table: low, six seats, a Cypriot water jug that has no business being there and stays anyway. The back half is the wheel, the wedging bench, the glaze buckets and the shelves of pots waiting for their second firing. Nothing separates the two but a curtain that is usually open, so on a firing day the room smells faintly of hot brick and everyone drinks their tea slightly warmer than they meant to.
How the tea gets here
Tea is bought in small lots, once or twice a year, from five sources: a broker in Xiamen who has sent us the same Anxi oolong since 2021, a shipper in Taiwan who buys for us at the Lugu winter competition and again on Ali Shan in the spring, a Japanese importer in Rotterdam, a family in Guria who make about six hundred kilos of black tea a year, and a Yunnan warehouse for the pressed cakes.
We buy what we can taste and afford to sit on. That means the shelf is short by choice, and it means that when the Ashikubo sencha runs out in February it stays gone until the new crop lands in June. Nothing gets topped up with a different lot under the same name.
Why the sun
Surya is the sun. The name arrived before the shop did, on a mug Anastasia made in 2016 with a stamped sun on the foot, which she used every morning until the handle came off in a move.
Every piece that leaves the studio carries that stamp, pressed into the clay while it is still soft enough to take it. It is the only mark on the work — no signature, no glaze pen, no sticker. If a piece has the sun on its foot, it was made in this room.
In order
2015 – 2026
- 2015
Anastasia takes an evening throwing course in a basement studio in Saint Petersburg, mostly to have somewhere to go on Thursdays. She centres her first ball of clay in week five and does not stop.
- 2018
She moves to Cyprus with two boxes of tools, no wheel and no kiln, and spends a year firing at a shared studio in Limassol, driving greenware over the mountain road in a crate of towels.
- 2020
A second-hand 60-litre electric kiln arrives from a retiring potter in Larnaca. The first firing cracks eleven pieces out of fourteen; the twelfth is a cup she still drinks from.
- 2022
The lease on the room is signed in March. The tea table opens in September with one low table, four seats and a shelf of six teas bought with money that should have gone on a second kiln.
- 2024
The first workshop runs on a Saturday in February — four people, four pinch pots, one of which explodes in the bisque because nobody had explained about air pockets yet. The explanation is now on the first page of the handout.
- 2026
A short shelf of tea, a gas kiln at the back wall, and a calendar that holds clay afternoons and tea sittings side by side. Still one pair of hands at the wheel.
How we work
What you can hold us to
If it has the sun on its foot, it was made in this room
Nothing on the ceramics shelf is bought in, imported blank and glazed here, or made by anyone other than Anastasia. Ask which firing a piece came out of and you will get a date, not a shrug.
Every tea has a year, and when it runs out it is gone
Harvest, region and lot are on the label. We would rather show an empty space on the shelf for four months than refill a name with a cheaper lot and hope nobody notices the difference.
Flaws are labelled, discounted and never hidden
A glaze crawl, a warped rim, a firing crack that will not leak — these go in the seconds crate at a lower price with the fault written on the tag. You should be able to see what you are buying before you get it home.
From here