Damietta
— — a delta port the river still gives its name to.
Not only on a wall.
“Damietta sits where the eastern branch of the Nile meets the Mediterranean, about fifteen kilometres inland of the sea. The city has carried the name of the river's branch since the Middle Ages, and the river has carried the name of the city back. A Crusader army camped on these banks for eighteen months during the Fifth Crusade in 1218 and never reached Cairo. Today the port works furniture: this is the city Egypt builds its inlaid wood and gilded chairs in, more than half of the country's output, in small workshops along the lanes. from the studio
Damietta, 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.
Damietta — Dumyat in Arabic — is a Nile Delta port city of roughly 330,000 people, the seat of Damietta Governorate, in the far northeast of Egypt. The city sits on the east bank of the Damietta branch of the Nile, about fifteen kilometres south of where the river enters the Mediterranean Sea at Ras El Bar. To its west lies Lake Manzala, one of the largest brackish lagoons in the country. The modern deep-water port at the river mouth, opened in 1986, is one of Egypt's busiest, handling container, bulk, and liquefied natural gas traffic.
Damietta was a major Mediterranean trading port in the Fatimid and Ayyubid periods and the chosen target of two Crusader expeditions. In the Fifth Crusade, a Latin army under John of Brienne and the papal legate Pelagius landed in May 1218, besieged the city for eighteen months, and took it in November 1219, only to be forced to give it back in 1221 after their march on Cairo failed at the Nile floods. Louis IX of France took the city again in 1249 in the Seventh Crusade and lost it the following year. The Mamluk sultan Baybars dismantled the medieval walls in 1260 to prevent a third campaign.
Damietta is the furniture capital of Egypt. By widely cited industry estimates, the city's workshops produce more than half of the country's wooden furniture — inlaid, turned, gilded, and carved pieces in a style descended from late Ottoman and French nineteenth-century forms. The trade is concentrated in family workshops along the lanes of the old city and in the larger industrial zone south of town, and supplies both the domestic market and exports across the Gulf and North Africa. The Amr ibn al-As mosque, founded in the seventh century and rebuilt many times, anchors the historic center; its current fabric dates largely to a 1986 restoration.