Mosul
— — a river city learning the shape of its own minaret again.
Not only on a wall.
“A city on both banks of the Tigris in northern Iraq, opposite the ruined walls of ancient Nineveh. The Old City on the west bank was heavily damaged during the 2014 to 2017 occupation, and the leaning al-Hadba minaret of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri fell in 2017. UNESCO and Moslawi stonemasons have been rebuilding it brick by brick under the Revive the Spirit of Mosul programme.
Mosul, 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.
Mosul lies on both banks of the Tigris in northern Iraq, roughly 250 miles north of Baghdad and 50 miles south of the Turkish border. The east bank holds the modern city and Mosul University; the west bank holds the Old City and the ruins of ancient Nineveh, capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire until its fall in 612 BC. The greater metropolitan population is estimated at around 1.7 million, making Mosul Iraq's second-largest city after Baghdad. The surrounding Nineveh Plains hold one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world.
The Great Mosque of al-Nuri was founded in 1172 by Nur al-Din Zengi, the Sunni ruler who unified much of Syria and northern Iraq. Its leaning brick minaret, al-Hadba, stood roughly 45 metres tall and tilted noticeably for centuries, giving the city the nickname the Hunchback. The mosque and minaret were destroyed in June 2017 during the battle to retake the city. UNESCO launched the Revive the Spirit of Mosul programme in 2018, funded in large part by the United Arab Emirates, to reconstruct the mosque, al-Hadba, and the nearby al-Tahera and al-Saa'a churches.
Reconstruction has been a years-long programme of cataloguing, recovering, and replacing original masonry block by block. Local stonemasons and craftspeople trained under the project carry much of the work; rubble from the collapsed minaret has been sorted and reused where it remained structurally sound. The al-Tahera and al-Saa'a churches in the Old City have reopened as part of the same effort. The west bank Old City continues to repopulate at a slower pace than the modern east bank across the river.