Axum
— — stone the empire left standing.
Not only on a wall.
“An old town on the northern Ethiopian plateau, with a field of carved granite stelae that have stood for sixteen centuries. The largest still upright reaches about twenty-four metres, cut from a single block and raised by hand. Beside the stelae park, the precinct of Our Lady Mary of Zion holds, by long tradition, the Ark of the Covenant. Coffee comes in small cups with frankincense smoke. Above the town, the dry highland air thins and the light goes pink across the masonry just before evening.
Axum, 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.
Axum sits at roughly 2,131 metres on the highland plateau of the Tigray Region in northern Ethiopia. It was the capital of the Aksumite Empire, which from about the first century until the seventh dominated trade between the Red Sea and the African interior and minted its own coinage in gold, silver and bronze. The archaeological core — stelae fields, royal tombs and palace foundations — was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980. Modern Axum is a working town of around 75,000 with a university, a market and the precinct of Our Lady Mary of Zion at its centre.
The Aksumite stelae are single shafts of nepheline syenite carved to imitate multi-storey buildings, with false doors and beams cut in low relief. The tallest still standing rises to about twenty-four metres; a larger one, often called the Great Stele, collapsed in antiquity. The twenty-four-metre Obelisk of Axum, looted by Italian forces in 1937, was returned in three sections by Italy in 2005 and re-erected in 2008 on its original ground. The stones were quarried four kilometres outside town and moved without iron tools.
The town's calendar turns on Timkat in January, the Ethiopian Orthodox feast of Epiphany, when processions carry replicas of the tabot from each church under embroidered umbrellas. Axum's own celebration centres on the precinct of Our Lady Mary of Zion, where, by long Orthodox tradition, the original Ark of the Covenant is kept and guarded by a single monk who is permitted no visitors. The November feast of Hidar Tsion draws pilgrims from across Tigray and the diaspora, and fills the town with white shamma cloth and chant.