Khoy
— — the city the old Silk Road remembers.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of about a quarter-million on a high plain in West Azerbaijan Province, ringed by the mountains that fold toward Turkey and Armenia. The old Silk Road came through here, and the sandstone minaret of Shams Tabrizi still stands at the western edge, the one ringed with ibex horns. Sunflower fields turn the surrounding plain yellow late in the summer. The January 2023 earthquake rattled the walls; the gates are still here. from the studio
Khoy, 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.
Khoy sits in the high northwest of Iran, in West Azerbaijan Province, about 1,163 metres above sea level on a plain ringed by mountains that fold toward the Turkish and Armenian borders. The population is roughly 200,000. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the region, long a caravan stop on the road between Tabriz and the eastern Anatolian routes. Sunflower cultivation in the surrounding district is large enough that the city is sometimes called Iran's sunflower capital. A magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck the area in January 2023, damaging older buildings but leaving the principal landmarks standing.
The signature monument is the minaret of Shams Tabrizi at the western edge of town, a sandstone tower studded with the horn-cores of mountain ibex. It marks the traditional burial site of the 13th-century mystic Shams-i Tabrizi, teacher of Rumi. The Khan Takhti gate and a stretch of the old city wall also survive in the historic core. Khoy was an important enough crossing in the late Ilkhanid and Safavid periods that the city is named in Marco Polo's account of his journey east. The horn-studded minaret is unusual in Iranian Islamic architecture.
The plain runs hot and dry through July and August, then turns into a long sweep of yellow as the sunflower fields come into bloom. Winters are cold; snow on the surrounding ranges is common from December through February. The best window for the city itself is late spring through early autumn, when the high air is clear and the light off the sandstone walls of the Shams Tabrizi minaret carries a long way. The nearby Qotur Bridge and the road toward Maku show the same dry-mountain palette.