Cuttack
— — a thousand years of silver, still being drawn into thread.
Not only on a wall.
“A thousand-year-old city on the delta where the Mahanadi splits into the Kathajodi. Cuttack still goes by Millennium City, and the silver workers in Nayasarak still pull metal into filigree thread the way their grandfathers did. In November the Bali Yatra fair fills the riverbank with paper boats, a quiet remembering of the merchants who once sailed for Bali and Java.
Cuttack, 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.
Cuttack sits at the head of the Mahanadi delta in coastal Odisha, where the river forks into the Kathajodi before reaching the Bay of Bengal. The old town was founded around 989 CE by the Somavamshi king Nrupa Keshari, and served as the capital of Odisha until 1948 when the seat moved to Bhubaneswar, twenty-eight kilometres south. The ruins of Barabati Fort, built in the fourteenth century by the Eastern Ganga dynasty and later held by Mukunda Deva, still hold a corner of the riverbank. The city remains Odisha's commercial and judicial centre, its old quarters laid out along the stone ghats above the river.
The city is held by two rivers. The Mahanadi runs along the north, the Kathajodi along the south, and Cuttack sits on the spit between them. Every monsoon, from June through September, both channels rise hard against the embankments first raised by British engineers in the 1860s after the catastrophic flood of 1866. The Jobra Anicut barrage, completed on the Mahanadi in 1869, was among the earliest major irrigation works in eastern India and still feeds canals that water the delta below the city.
Bali Yatra falls every November on Kartik Purnima, the full moon of the Hindu month Kartik. The fair runs for a week on the Mahanadi bank and remembers the Sadhabas, the Odia maritime merchants who once sailed from this coast to Bali, Java and Sumatra. At dawn families set small banana-bark boats with lit lamps onto the river, a private version of the sailings the festival commemorates. It is one of the largest open-air fairs in eastern India and has been held in some form for nearly a thousand years.