Herat
— — Timurid blue, holding under a dry wind.
Not only on a wall.
“Herat sits on the Hari River in the far west of Afghanistan, an oasis city on the old Silk Road between Iran and the central Asian steppe. The Friday Mosque at its centre still wears its 15th-century Timurid tilework, the deep cobalt and turquoise that the Persianate world used to mark the holiest faces of a building. Outside the walls, four minarets of the lost Musalla complex still stand alone in a dry field, kept upright by guy-wires since the earthquakes of the last century. from the studio
Herat, 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.
Herat is the third-largest city in Afghanistan and the seat of Herat Province, set in a wide irrigated valley along the Hari River about 120 kilometres east of the Iranian border. The 2022 estimate put the city's population at around 574,000. The site has been continuously inhabited since at least the 5th century BC, when it was known to the Achaemenids as Haraiva, and it served as the western capital of the Timurid empire from 1405 under Shah Rukh, the son of Timur.
The Friday Mosque, or Masjid-i Jami, was founded on the site of a Zoroastrian fire temple and rebuilt in its present form by the Ghurid sultan Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad in 1200. Its courtyard, about 110 by 65 metres, holds four ivans faced in deep cobalt and turquoise tile restored over the 20th century in an on-site workshop. Outside the walls, the Citadel of Herat, the Qala Ikhtyaruddin, occupies an earthen platform first raised by Alexander the Great in 330 BC and rebuilt in the 14th century after the Mongol sack.
The Musalla complex north of the old city was built between 1417 and 1438 by Queen Gawhar Shad, the wife of Shah Rukh, as a school, a mosque, and her own mausoleum. Twenty minarets once surrounded it. British engineers dynamited most of the complex in 1885 to clear sight-lines against a feared Russian advance, and the 1931 Mazandaran earthquake brought down more. Five minarets remained standing in the 20th century; today four are still upright, held by steel cables, and listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List.