Paradesi Synagogue
— — the floor where the blue tiles never repeat.
Not only on a wall.
“The oldest active synagogue in the Commonwealth, set behind Mattancherry Palace where the spice lanes still smell of cardamom and clove. The floor is laid with hand-painted Cantonese tiles, no two alike, brought by sea around 1762. Belgian glass lamps hang above them. The clock tower outside keeps four faces in four scripts, so the port could read the hour in whichever language it spoke.
Paradesi Synagogue, 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.
The Paradesi Synagogue stands at the end of Synagogue Lane in Mattancherry, the southern half of old Kochi, on the inland edge of the Vembanad backwaters in Kerala. It was built in 1568 by Sephardic Jews who had arrived from Iberia and the Levant after the expulsions, and consecrated next to the Mattancherry Palace of the Kochi rajas. The community called itself Paradesi, foreigner. The clock tower beside the prayer hall was added in 1761 by Ezekiel Rahabi, the merchant who anchored the synagogue's second century.
The floor is the famous thing. Roughly 1,100 hand-painted blue-and-white tiles were brought from Canton around 1762, each panel a willow-pattern scene with small variations in the bridge, the boat, the pagoda. No two tiles repeat. Above them hang Belgian chandeliers in coloured glass, red, green, and blue, that the congregation lit for the High Holy Days. The square clock tower outside the prayer hall carries four faces in Hebrew, Roman, Malayalam, and Arabic numerals, one for each language the spice port spoke in the eighteenth century.
The synagogue is open to visitors most days except Saturday and Jewish holidays, with a small entrance fee and a strict no-photography rule inside the prayer hall. Shoes come off at the door. The lane is reached through Mattancherry's spice market, about two kilometres south of Fort Kochi by auto-rickshaw or a slow walk. The active congregation has dwindled to a handful, but a caretaker keeps the lamps lit and the Torah scrolls in their silver cases beside the ark.