Great Mosque of Samarra
— — a spiral climbing into desert sky.
Not only on a wall.
“The brick walls of the Abbasid mosque hold their square against the river plain, and the Malwiya minaret turns its way up out of it. For a short period in the ninth century this was the largest mosque in the world. The walls are lower now, the prayer hall is gone, and the ramp around the tower still climbs in one slow gesture toward the sky over Samarra. — from the studio
Great Mosque of Samarra, 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.
The Great Mosque of Samarra was built between 848 and 851 under the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil, on the east bank of the Tigris about 125 kilometres north of Baghdad. Its outer enclosure measures roughly 240 by 158 metres, a footprint that made it the largest mosque in the world at the time. The prayer hall and its forest of wooden columns are long gone, but the baked-brick perimeter walls and the bastions still stand. Since 2007 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Samarra Archaeological City.
The Malwiya, the spiral minaret north of the enclosure, rises about 52 metres on a square base, with a helical ramp winding counter-clockwise to the top in five turns. It is built of baked brick, mortared without the carved stonework of later Islamic architecture. The form has no close precedent in the region, and it has been linked formally to older Mesopotamian ziggurats by historians of Islamic art. The walls of the mosque itself stand to about ten metres in places, the same colour as the plain.
Samarra served as the Abbasid capital for less than sixty years, from 836 to 892, before the court returned to Baghdad. The mosque sits inside that brief, intense building phase. In April 2005 the top of the Malwiya was damaged by an insurgent bomb; the structure as a whole survives. UNESCO has listed the site as endangered since the 2007 inscription, citing both conflict and the difficulty of long-term conservation in a working archaeological landscape.