Gorgan
— — a city where the forest comes down to meet the steppe.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Golestan Province, set on the southeastern shoulder of the Caspian Sea where the Alborz mountains fold into the plain. The old city keeps its mud-brick courtyards and Qajar-era brick houses behind low walls. The Hyrcanian forest comes down to the city's edge, a remnant of woodland that survived the last ice age and now carries UNESCO World Heritage status. East of town the Gorgan Wall, once called the Red Snake, runs 195 kilometres across the steppe in fired-brick fragments. The colour the artist found here is the green the rain leaves on old brick. — from the studio
Gorgan, 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.
Gorgan is the capital of Golestan Province in northern Iran, with a population of about 360,000 in the 2016 census. It sits about 30 kilometres south of the Caspian Sea on the southeastern shoulder of the Alborz mountains, at the meeting point of the forested mountain slope and the open Turkmen steppe. The city was historically called Astarabad until 1937, and traces of settlement here go back to the Hyrcanian satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire. The old quarter still holds Qajar-era brick courtyard houses with stepped facades and arched alleys.
East of the city runs the Great Wall of Gorgan, called the Red Snake for its colour and length. It is a Sasanian-period defensive line of about 195 kilometres, built mostly of standardised fired brick in the fifth or sixth century to hold the steppe nomads back from the Caspian plain. Archaeologists have identified more than thirty forts spaced along its length, garrisoning an estimated 30,000 troops at its height. It is one of the longest defensive walls in the ancient world, second only to the Great Wall of China, and remains visible in low ridges across the farmland.
The Hyrcanian forest comes down to the southern edge of the city — a temperate broadleaf woodland of beech, oak, and hornbeam that survived the last glaciation and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2019. The climate is humid subtropical by Iranian standards, with annual rainfall around 600 millimetres and a wet season concentrated in autumn. Gorgan sits at roughly 155 metres elevation. Persian and Turkmen are both heard in the markets, and the rice fields of the Caspian lowlands begin just north of the city, separating the forested mountain from the dry steppe to the east.