Constantine
— — the city the bridges hold together.
Not only on a wall.
“Constantine is built on a limestone plateau that the Rhumel river has cut into a horseshoe gorge two hundred metres deep. Seven bridges span the chasm, and the city is named for the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, who rebuilt it in 313 after Cirta was destroyed. The Sidi M'Cid suspension bridge, opened in 1912, hangs 175 metres above the river and was the highest of its kind in the world when it was built. from the studio
Constantine, 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.
Constantine is the third-largest city in Algeria and the capital of Constantine Province, with a population of about 450,000. It sits on a limestone plateau roughly 640 metres above sea level in the country's eastern highlands, about 80 kilometres inland from the Mediterranean port of Skikda. The plateau is cut on three sides by the gorge of the Rhumel river, which drops some 200 metres below the city, and the modern city is bound together by a sequence of seven bridges built between 1792 and 1962. The site has been inhabited since at least the fourth century BCE, when it was the Numidian capital Cirta.
Of the seven bridges, the Sidi M'Cid suspension bridge is the one that gives the city its silhouette. Opened in April 1912 by the French civil engineer Ferdinand Arnodin, it spans 168 metres across the Rhumel gorge and hangs 175 metres above the river — at the time the highest suspension bridge in the world. The El-Kantara bridge, in roughly the same location, has carried traffic across the gorge since Roman times and was last rebuilt in 1863. The footbridge at Mellah Slimane, opened in 1925, is the one most residents cross on foot each day.
Constantine was named the Capital of Arab Culture for 2015, and the city built up the Emir Abdelkader mosque — among the largest in Africa, with twin 107-metre minarets — in the run-up to the year. The malouf musical tradition, the Andalusian classical style brought from Granada after 1492, is centred on the city and is performed through the year at the Zenith concert hall and at smaller venues in the old medina. The Roman-era ruins of Tiddis sit 30 kilometres to the northwest, and the Numidian royal tomb of Massinissa, the second-century BCE king of the Numidians, stands at El Khroub just south of the city.