Amol
— — a Caspian city the mountain looks down on.
Not only on a wall.
“An ancient Caspian city in Mazandaran, set on the Haraz River where it leaves the Alborz foothills for the coastal plain. Mount Damavand, the highest peak in the Middle East at 5,609 metres, stands about seventy kilometres south and is visible from the older neighbourhoods on clear winter mornings. Amol is named in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and has been a regional centre for more than a thousand years. The land around it grows rice, citrus, and kiwifruit.
Amol, 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.
Amol sits in the central plain of Mazandaran Province, on the Haraz River about eighteen kilometres south of the Caspian Sea coast. The city's population is roughly 240,000. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited towns in northern Iran, named in the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi and recorded as a capital of Mazandaran under the Bavandid and Marashi dynasties. The Haraz Road, which still climbs from Amol over the Alborz to Tehran, has carried trade and travellers between the Caspian region and the Iranian plateau for centuries.
The Haraz rises high in the Alborz on the slopes of Damavand and reaches Amol after a steep descent through one of the most dramatic river canyons in Iran. Below the city the river runs out across the rice plain and into the Caspian. Amol's old quarters sit on both banks, and several arched stone bridges, including the twelfth-century Mohammad Hassan Khan Bridge, still cross the channel. The water is fast in spring snowmelt, low and clear in late summer, and runs cold all year.
From the higher streets of Amol on a clear winter morning, Mount Damavand fills the southern horizon: a single, almost symmetrical cone rising to 5,609 metres, the highest peak in the Middle East. The mountain is a dormant volcano and snow-covered most of the year. From the Caspian coast forty minutes north the view is different again, with the whole Alborz wall behind the rice fields. The air here is humid by Iranian standards, softened by the sea and shaped by the mountain.