Banda Aceh
— — a white mosque the wave did not take.
Not only on a wall.
“Capital of Aceh, at the northern point of Sumatra where the Indian Ocean meets the Strait of Malacca. The Baiturrahman Grand Mosque, white-walled with black domes, stood through the December 2004 wave while almost everything around it was carried off. The city rebuilt around it. The Tsunami Museum on Sultan Iskandar Muda holds the silence. from the studio
Banda Aceh, 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.
Banda Aceh is the capital and largest city of Aceh province, at the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, at the confluence of the Indian Ocean and the Strait of Malacca. Its population is roughly 260,000. The city was the seat of the Sultanate of Aceh from the early sixteenth century, a major Indian Ocean entrepôt for pepper and gold, and one of the principal points of contact between Islam and the wider Malay world. It is the westernmost provincial capital in Indonesia.
The Baiturrahman Grand Mosque, Masjid Raya Baiturrahman, was completed in 1881 on the site of an earlier sultanate mosque burned during the Dutch invasion of 1873. The single black dome of the original has grown, through twentieth and twenty-first century expansions, to seven black domes, eight minarets, and a marble courtyard that holds tens of thousands of worshippers. On December 26, 2004 the mosque survived as much of the surrounding district was carried away.
The Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of December 26, 2004 came ashore at Banda Aceh roughly thirty minutes after the rupture, with waves estimated above twenty metres on parts of the coast. More than 60,000 people in the city died. The Aceh Tsunami Museum on Sultan Iskandar Muda, designed by Ridwan Kamil and opened in 2009, is built as a long dark passage that opens to a circular well of light, the names of the dead carved on its walls.