Pohnpei
— — a city the sea grew around.
Not only on a wall.
“A high volcanic island east of Guam, ringed by a barrier reef and holding one of the wettest interiors on Earth. The Nahnmwarki kingdoms built a stone city on the eastern shore, Nan Madol, on close to a hundred artificial islets laid down with basalt prisms heavier than cars. The mangroves have taken back the channels between them. Sokehs Rock rises above the lagoon at Kolonia, dark as cooled lava, which it is.
Pohnpei, 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.
Pohnpei is the largest island in the Federated States of Micronesia and home to the federal capital at Palikir on the north coast. The island is volcanic, roughly twenty-two kilometres across, ringed by a barrier reef and dotted with high interior peaks that pull down some of the heaviest rainfall recorded anywhere on Earth, measured above seven metres a year in the highlands. The resident population is around 34,000. Air access is through Pohnpei International Airport on the small offshore islet of Deketik, served by United's island-hopper route from Honolulu and Guam.
Off the eastern shore at Madolenihmw sits Nan Madol, a city of close to a hundred artificial islets built from columnar basalt over four centuries from roughly 1200 CE. The Saudeleur and later Nahnmwarki dynasties laid the prisms in alternating courses, some weighing over five tonnes, to make burial vaults, royal residences and tide-fed channels. UNESCO inscribed the site as a World Heritage property in 2016 and listed it as in danger the same year, citing mangrove overgrowth and channel siltation. Local boatmen run quiet tours from Madolenihmw village at high tide.
Pohnpei's interior is rainforest watered by some of the heaviest precipitation on record; the highland village of Awak has averaged over ten metres of rain in a single year. Roughly forty-six rivers come down from the peaks, the longest of them the Lehnmesi, and the freshwater pours out through the barrier-reef passes into a lagoon that turns the colour of weak tea after a hard storm. Kepirohi Falls, on the road to Madolenihmw, drops about twenty metres through black basalt, the same stone the Nahnmwarki cut for Nan Madol.