Nishapur
— — a poets' city under a turquoise hill.
Not only on a wall.
“A Khorasan city at the foot of the Binalud mountains, once one of the great cities of the Islamic world. Omar Khayyam is buried here under a lattice-work tower; Attar is two kilometres away. The turquoise mines in the hills above have worked the same blue stone for two thousand years. The Mongols levelled it once. It came back.
Nishapur, 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.
Nishapur sits in Razavi Khorasan province in northeastern Iran, at the southern foot of the Binalud Range about 110 kilometres west of Mashhad. Founded in the third century by the Sasanian king Shapur I, the city grew under the Tahirids and Samanids and by the eleventh century was among the largest cities in the Islamic world. Mongol armies under Tolui destroyed it in April 1221. The modern city, with a population near 250,000 and an elevation of roughly 1,250 metres, holds the tombs of Omar Khayyam and Attar within walking distance of each other.
The hills above Nishapur hold the oldest worked turquoise deposits in the world. The Madan mines, in the village of the same name about fifty kilometres northwest of the city, have produced firouzeh, the deep-sky blue stone, for at least two thousand years and supplied courts from Achaemenid Persia to Mughal India. The Tomb of Omar Khayyam, completed in 1963 by Iranian architect Hooshang Seyhoun, rises as a perforated white tetrahedron over the poet's grave, its lattice cut with verses from the Rubaiyat. The Attar Mausoleum, rebuilt under Reza Shah, stands nearby.
Nishapur is reached most easily by road from Mashhad, roughly ninety minutes east along the Highway 44 corridor, or by train on the Tehran-Mashhad line which stops at the city's station. The Omar Khayyam Garden, which holds the poet's tomb, opens daily and charges a small entry fee for non-Iranian visitors. The annual Khayyam commemoration falls on May 18, the date Iran assigns to his birth in 1048. The turquoise bazaar in the old city sells stones cut at workshops above the Madan mines and graded by colour and matrix.