Bahrain Island
— — the island where the pearl boats came in.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest island of an archipelago of thirty-three in the Persian Gulf, joined to Saudi Arabia by the King Fahd Causeway since 1986. Manama on the north shore, the old pearl harbour now wrapped in glass towers. Inland, a single mesquite tree has held its ground in the desert for four centuries. The pearling dhows are mostly gone, but the wind on the western coast still smells of salt and limestone.
Bahrain Island, 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.
Bahrain Island, the largest of the archipelago's thirty-three islands, lies in the Persian Gulf roughly 24 kilometres east of the Saudi Arabian coast. It covers about 590 square kilometres and rises to 134 metres at Jabal ad-Dukhan in the centre. The King Fahd Causeway, opened in 1986, runs 25 kilometres across the Gulf and remains the only road link to the mainland. Manama, the capital, sits on the northern end; the island holds nearly all of the kingdom's 1.5 million residents.
Qal'at al-Bahrain, the Bahrain Fort, stands on an artificial mound on the northern shore that has been continuously occupied since around 2300 BC. Excavations have identified seven layers of settlement, beginning with the Dilmun civilisation that traded copper between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. The visible Portuguese fortress on top was built in the sixteenth century during the brief Portuguese occupation of the Gulf. UNESCO inscribed the site in 2005 for its continuous habitation and its role as the capital of ancient Dilmun.
The Gulf around Bahrain was the world's centre of natural pearl diving for nearly two thousand years. Fleets of wooden dhows worked the offshore oyster beds from May to October until the Japanese cultured-pearl trade collapsed the market in the 1930s. Three of the original pearling pathways through Muharraq, the island just north of Manama, were inscribed by UNESCO in 2012 as the Pearling, Testimony of an Island Economy site. The boats are mostly gone; the harbour and the merchant houses remain.