Kermanshah
— — rock reliefs older than the road that runs past them.
Not only on a wall.
“An old city of the western Zagros, set on the Silk Road route that ran from Mesopotamia up onto the Iranian plateau. The rock reliefs at Taq-e Bostan are cut into a cliff at the city's edge, with sculpted scenes of Sasanian kings under arched grottoes. East of town the cliff at Bisotun carries the trilingual inscription Darius I ordered cut around 520 BC, the inscription that gave the 19th century its key to Old Persian. Kurdish is widely spoken in the bazaar. The summers are dry; the winters bring snow.
Kermanshah, 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.
Kermanshah is the capital of Kermanshah Province in western Iran, set in a valley of the central Zagros Mountains at an elevation of about 1,420 metres. The 2016 census recorded a city population of roughly 950,000, making it one of the larger cities of the Iranian west. The population is largely Kurdish, with Kurdish and Persian both in common use. The city sits on the historic road from Baghdad to Tehran, a route that carried trade between Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau for millennia. Founded in the Sasanian period, it has been continuously inhabited since.
Two of Iran's most important rock-cut monuments lie at the edge of the city. Taq-e Bostan, on a cliff above a spring, holds Sasanian reliefs from the 4th to 7th centuries showing royal investitures and boar and stag hunts under arched grottoes. About 30 kilometres east, the Bisotun cliff carries the great trilingual inscription Darius I ordered cut around 520 BC in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. Its decipherment by Henry Rawlinson in the 1830s and 40s opened the cuneiform record of the ancient Near East. UNESCO inscribed Bisotun in 2006.
Kermanshah is reached by road and air. Shahid Ashrafi Esfahani Airport, about 8 kilometres east of the centre, runs domestic flights to Tehran and Mashhad. The city is roughly 525 kilometres west of Tehran by the Hamadan road. Taq-e Bostan sits on the northern edge of the city and is open daily. Bisotun is a 30-minute drive east along the old highway and the inscription is best read in late-afternoon light. Summers run hot and dry; January temperatures often hold below freezing and the surrounding mountains carry snow into spring.