Béjaïa
— — a Mediterranean harbour that taught Europe to count.
Not only on a wall.
“A Mediterranean port on the Kabyle coast of eastern Algeria, where the Soummam river meets the sea. The old casbah climbs above the harbour; Cap Carbon stands a few kilometres east, one of the tallest natural lighthouse cliffs on the Mediterranean. Leonardo of Pisa learned Hindu-Arabic numerals here around 1200, while his father served as a Pisan customs official. The French word for candle still carries the town's old name.
Béjaïa, 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.
Béjaïa sits on a deep curve of the Mediterranean coast in northeastern Algeria, at the mouth of the Soummam river, in the Kabylie region. Its population is roughly 180,000, and the city is the capital of Béjaïa Province. The Berber name in Tamazight is Bgayet. The harbour has been worked since antiquity; Phoenician, Roman, and Hammadid traders all used it. The eleventh-century Hammadid dynasty made Béjaïa its coastal capital. Cap Carbon, the headland five kilometres east, rises over two hundred metres above the sea and carries one of the highest natural-cliff lighthouses on the Mediterranean.
Above the harbour, the casbah climbs the slopes of Yemma Gouraya, the 660-metre peak that gives the surrounding national park its name. Bab el-Bahr, the Sea Gate, is the surviving fortified arch of the medieval port wall. Higher up, the ruins of the Hammadid citadel and the Fort de Gouraya, rebuilt by the Spanish in the sixteenth century and again by the French in the nineteenth, mark the layers of the town's rulers. The stone is mostly limestone, weathered grey near the sea and warmer where it climbs into the pines of the upper park.
Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, spent part of his youth in Béjaïa around 1200, where his father Guglielmo Bonacci was posted as a Pisan customs representative. There he learned the Hindu-Arabic numeral system from Arab merchants and teachers; his 1202 book *Liber Abaci* carried that system into European mathematics. Béjaïa was also a major medieval wax exporter, and the French word for candle, *bougie*, comes from the town's old name. The history sits lightly on the modern port, which today moves grain, hydrocarbons, and container freight up the Mediterranean.