Tlemcen
— — a green plateau, a white minaret, an old caravan road.
Not only on a wall.
“An inland city on a high plateau in northwest Algeria, close enough to the Moroccan border that the call to prayer carries west. Tlemcen was the capital of the Zayyanid sultanate for three centuries and a meeting point of Berber, Andalusi, and Maghrebi craft. The Great Mosque was finished in 1136 under the Almoravids; the minaret of the ruined Mansourah mosque still stands alone on the plain west of the medina. Olive groves, plane trees, the smell of orange blossom in spring. from the studio
Tlemcen, 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.
Tlemcen sits on a plateau at about 800 metres in northwest Algeria, roughly forty kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast and forty kilometres east of the Moroccan border. The city is the seat of Tlemcen Province and counts a population of about 140,000 in the urban core, with the wider commune larger again. It was founded on the site of the Roman Pomaria, became the capital of the Zayyanid sultanate from 1235 to 1554, and changed hands repeatedly between Almoravid, Almohad, Marinid, Ottoman, and French rule. The Tell Atlas rises south of the city and shapes the local climate.
The Great Mosque of Tlemcen, finished in 1136 under the Almoravid ruler Ali ibn Yusuf, is one of the most important surviving Almoravid buildings in the Maghreb, with a carved muqarnas dome over the mihrab that influenced Andalusi mosque architecture for a century after. The Mansourah complex, west of the medina, was begun by the Marinids in 1303 during the long siege of the Zayyanid capital; its minaret still stands as a forty-metre tower of dressed stone, three of its four walls now gone. The Sidi Boumediene complex in El Eubbad combines a fourteenth-century Marinid mosque, madrasa, and tomb.
The city's climate is Mediterranean tempered by elevation. Summers run dry and warm but rarely extreme by Saharan standards, with high temperatures in the low thirties Celsius and cool plateau nights; winters are cool and wet with occasional snow on the Tlemcen Mountains south of the medina. Spring is the established season for visiting, when orange and bitter-orange trees flower in the courtyards of the older houses and the surrounding olive groves green up after the winter rain. The Cherry Festival of nearby Beni-Snous draws regional crowds in May, and the city held the role of Capital of Islamic Culture in 2011.