Sylhet
— — the green that comes back after every monsoon.
Not only on a wall.
“A city in the Surma valley pressed up against the Indian border, where the Bengal plain finally gives out and the Khasi Hills begin. The shrine of Shah Jalal, the fourteenth-century Sufi who brought Islam to the region, sits in the old quarter and still gathers pilgrims daily. Tea gardens run south to Sreemangal; the river at Bichanakandi runs over flat stones the colour of slate.
Sylhet, 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.
Sylhet is the principal city of Sylhet Division in northeastern Bangladesh, set on the Surma River around 247 km northeast of Dhaka. The metropolitan area holds roughly half a million people. The Khasi and Jaintia Hills of the Indian state of Meghalaya rise just across the northern border, and the rainfall they catch feeds the rivers, wetlands, and tea estates of the surrounding plain. The region is the historical and cultural homeland of the Bangladeshi Sylheti diaspora, much of which migrated to the United Kingdom across the twentieth century.
The Hazrat Shahjalal Dargah, the shrine of Shah Jalal, anchors the old city. Shah Jalal arrived in the region from Yemen via Delhi in the early fourteenth century and is credited with the spread of Islam into northeastern Bengal; his death in Sylhet in 1346 is the traditional date. The dargah complex holds his tomb, a mosque, and a tank of fish considered sacred by visitors. The shrine remains an active site of daily pilgrimage and is one of the most-visited religious destinations in Bangladesh.
The Surma valley sits inside one of the wettest stretches of South Asia; just over the border, Cherrapunji and Mawsynram record some of the highest annual rainfall on Earth. The monsoon runs roughly June through September and floods large parts of the haor wetlands, including Tanguar Haor and Hakaluki Haor. The dry, cool months from November through February are the local visiting season, when the tea gardens around Sreemangal and the stone river at Bichanakandi are at their most settled.