Bidar
— — the city the maps forgot.
Not only on a wall.
“A walled town on a basalt plateau in northern Karnataka, six hundred kilometres inland from anywhere a tourist usually goes. From 1429 it was the capital of the Bahmani Sultanate, and the fort the Bahmanis built — and the Barid Shahis after them — still runs nearly five kilometres around a rim of black volcanic stone. Inside, the unfinished madrasa of Mahmud Gawan keeps half a single minaret standing where Persian tilework still flashes turquoise on a clear afternoon. Below the fort, in a row of small workshops, craftsmen inlay silver into blackened zinc-alloy — the Bidri ware that gives the city its name, and the only craft like it anywhere in the world. — from the studio
Bidar, 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.
Bidar sits on the northern edge of Karnataka at roughly 664 metres of elevation, on a basalt plateau that drops sharply to the plains of Telangana to the east. The city became the capital of the Bahmani Sultanate in 1429 under Ahmad Shah I, replacing Gulbarga, and remained a seat of power under the Barid Shahi dynasty from 1489 until the Mughal annexation under Aurangzeb in 1656. The walled old city of about 5.5 square kilometres holds the fort, the madrasa, several royal tombs, and the working quarters of Bidri craftsmen. The Archaeological Survey of India maintains most of the monumental fabric.
Bidar Fort, begun in 1428 and largely complete by the 1450s, runs about 4.8 kilometres of walls around the high plateau, ringed by a triple moat carved directly into the basalt bedrock. Inside, the Rangin Mahal, the Solah Khamba Mosque, and the audience hall of Diwan-i-Aam preserve Bahmani and Barid Shahi craftsmanship; the unfinished madrasa of Mahmud Gawan, built in 1472 in the Timurid style of Samarkand, still carries fragments of Persian glazed-tile mosaic on the surviving minaret. The site is on the UNESCO tentative list, submitted by India in 2014 as part of the Monuments and Forts of the Deccan Sultanate.
The nearest large airport is Hyderabad, about 140 kilometres east, with a three-hour drive on NH-150A; the nearest sizeable rail station is Bidar itself, on the South Central Railway line between Hyderabad and Bidar Junction. October through February is the cool dry season and the best window for the fort and the workshop visits. The Bidri craft cluster sits along the streets below the fort's southern gate, where eight families of registered artisans still work the inlay by hand; the craft received a Geographical Indication tag in 2006. Modest dress is expected at the tombs and mosques.