Yazd
— — a city built of mud that breathes.
Not only on a wall.
“An adobe city between the Dasht-e Kavir and the Dasht-e Lut, inscribed in 2017 as the first historic city in Iran on the UNESCO World Heritage list. The skyline is roof, dome, and windcatcher: the badgirs draw cool air down into the rooms below. The Ateshkadeh holds a Zoroastrian flame that tradition counts as continuous since roughly 470 CE. Water still arrives by qanat from the mountains.
Yazd, 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.
Yazd is the capital of Yazd Province in central Iran, sitting at roughly 1,200 metres elevation on the high plateau between the Dasht-e Kavir to the north and the Dasht-e Lut to the southeast. The historic city was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2017, the first historic city in Iran to be recognised in this way. The population is around 530,000. Marco Polo, passing through in the late thirteenth century, described it as a city of fine silks. The old quarter remains the largest continuously inhabited adobe city on earth.
Yazd's domestic architecture is built to manage a climate that runs to forty-five degrees Celsius in summer and below freezing in winter, with annual rainfall under 60 millimetres. The signature element is the badgir, a tall four- or six-sided windcatcher above the roof that channels passing wind down into the rooms and the underground cistern. The Dolat Abad Garden carries the tallest surviving example, at 33 metres. Water still travels in from the surrounding mountains by qanat, the gravity-fed underground channels that have served Iranian cities for at least two and a half millennia.
The historic core is best walked at dawn and again after sunset, when the adobe walls hold the day's heat without releasing it. The Jameh Mosque of Yazd, begun in the twelfth century and rebuilt under the Muzaffarids in the fourteenth, carries one of the tallest pairs of minarets in Iran at 48 metres. The Amir Chakhmaq Complex faces a public square that fills at dusk. The Ateshkadeh fire temple, a short ride south, holds a flame the Zoroastrian tradition counts as burning since the fifth century. The Towers of Silence stand on a hill outside the city.