Port Said
— — a city built the year the canal was.
Not only on a wall.
“At the Mediterranean mouth of the Suez Canal, on Egypt's north coast, founded in 1859 as the canal was dug. The 1869 lighthouse on the breakwater was the first reinforced concrete structure built anywhere. Old Khedival villas line Sharia Palestine, the ferry crosses to Port Fuad, and the canal traffic rolls past the corniche all day.
Port Said, 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.
Port Said sits at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, on the Mediterranean coast about 200 km north-east of Cairo. The city was founded in 1859, the year construction began at the Mediterranean end of the canal, and named after the reigning khedive Said Pasha. Population is around 750,000. Across the canal sits the smaller sister city Port Fuad, reached by a free passenger ferry that runs day and night. The Suez Canal Authority is headquartered here.
The Suez Canal opened on 17 November 1869, reducing the sea route from Europe to the Indian Ocean by roughly 7,000 km. The canal runs 193 km from Port Said south to Suez on the Red Sea, and the 2015 New Suez Canal added a 35 km parallel channel for two-way traffic. Around 50 ships transit on an average day, carrying about 12% of global trade. From the Port Said corniche the ships pass close enough to read the names on the bow.
The 1869 Port Said Lighthouse, designed by François Coignet, was the first major structure ever built in reinforced concrete: 56 metres of plain cylindrical mass on the western breakwater, still standing. Along Sharia Palestine the wood-balconied Khedival apartment buildings from the 1880s and 1890s carry the city's nineteenth-century cosmopolitan layer; many remain inhabited. The 1903 De Lesseps statue at the canal entrance was toppled in 1956 during the Suez Crisis and now rests in a warehouse. The empty plinth still faces the sea.