Barishal
— — the river that becomes the road.
Not only on a wall.
“The divisional capital of southern Bangladesh, where the Kirtankhola braids into the wider delta and the day starts on water. Country boats nose into the ghats before dawn. Upstream at Swarupkathi the floating guava market opens in late summer, hulls knocking, baskets passing hand to hand across the channels.
Barishal, 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.
Barishal sits on the Kirtankhola River in southern Bangladesh, the administrative seat of Barisal Division and one of the country's oldest river ports. The city anchors a delta of paddy, canals, and silt deposited by the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna system. The Rocket steamer service from Dhaka, run since the colonial period, still ties up at the Barishal ghat after a roughly fourteen-hour passage downstream. The city population is over three hundred thousand, with the wider division near nine million.
The surrounding waterways shape the year. Boats outnumber bridges across much of the division, and country trawlers carry rice, jute, and passengers between villages that have no road. Forty kilometres north, in the Pirojpur and Jhalokati districts, the floating markets of Swarupkathi, Atghor Kuriana, and Bhimruli open at dawn during the late-summer guava harvest. Wooden boats stack high with green fruit, the channel walls thick with guava orchards planted to the water's edge.
Two seasons rule the city. The southwest monsoon arrives in June and runs through September, lifting the rivers and flooding the lower paddies; the guava harvest at Swarupkathi peaks in July and August, when the floating markets are at their fullest. The cool dry months from November to February draw travellers down the Rocket from Dhaka, when the air is clear over the delta and the morning mist sits low on the Kirtankhola before the boats begin moving.