Biskra
— — a green line where the sand begins.
Not only on a wall.
“An oasis city where the Sahara meets the Aurès foothills, known for a thousand years as the gateway to the desert. Date palms cover the old town in a green band visible from the road down from Batna. André Gide came in the 1890s and could not leave; the French built a spa around the hot springs at Hammam Salihine. The light is unreasonably long, and the shade has to be earned.
Biskra, 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.
Biskra sits at the southern edge of the Aurès Mountains in northeastern Algeria, about 425 kilometres southeast of Algiers and 240 kilometres south of Constantine. It is the capital of Biskra Province and home to roughly 200,000 people. The city was the Roman garrison of Vescera, then an early stop on the Saharan caravan routes, and was occupied by the French army in 1844. Its oasis covers over a million date palms, irrigated by foggara channels that draw on the hot springs at Hammam Salihine, six kilometres west, where the water rises at 47°C.
The air at Biskra is desert-dry, with annual rainfall averaging around 130 millimetres and summer temperatures crossing 40°C through July and August. Winter draws visitors from Algiers and Constantine to the hammam complex at Sidi Salihine, in use since the Roman period and rebuilt under the French in the early twentieth century. Date harvest runs from October through December, and the deglet noor variety grown around Tolga and Sidi Okba carries the city's reputation as the date capital of Algeria, with provincial output around 350,000 tonnes a year.
Biskra is reached from Algiers in about six hours by road over the Aurès passes, or by a short flight to Mohamed Khider Airport from Algiers and Hassi Messaoud. The Belle Époque hotels of the French quarter, including the Royal Hotel where André Gide wintered in 1893 and 1894, are mostly gone or transformed into other uses. The Saharan Museum on Avenue Hakim Saadane keeps photography and textiles from the oasis villages of the Ziban. Sidi Okba, twenty kilometres east, holds the seventh-century tomb of the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi.