Ramadi
— — a long pale city the river holds in its bend.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Al Anbar, set where the Euphrates bends past date palms and low pale buildings. The Ottomans laid the town out in 1869 between the river and Lake Habbaniyah, and the river is still the reason the city is where it is. Mornings come up dry and bright; the long bridges carry traffic between the two banks. from the studio
Ramadi, 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.
Ramadi is the capital of Al Anbar Governorate, the largest governorate in Iraq, and sits on the south bank of the Euphrates about 110 kilometres west of Baghdad. The city was founded in 1869 by the Ottoman governor Midhat Pasha as a fortified posting between the river and Lake Habbaniyah. Today its population is estimated at roughly 500,000, mostly Sunni Arab, with farms and date groves along the riverbanks. Highway 1 runs east toward Fallujah and Baghdad, and the city is the administrative centre for a wide stretch of western desert.
The Euphrates is the reason Ramadi exists. Just upstream the river is regulated by the Ramadi Barrage, completed in 1956, which diverts spring floodwater west into Lake Habbaniyah through the Warrar regulator. The barrage and the lake together protect Baghdad from the worst of the seasonal floods. Within the city the river is wide and slow, lined with date palms and small farms, and crossed by several bridges. The river is also the local water source and the boundary that defines the older northern districts from the southern ones.
Ramadi has a hot desert climate. Summer highs from June through August routinely reach 43°C, and rain almost never falls between May and September. Winters are short and mild, with January lows near 5°C and a thin annual rainfall of about 115 millimetres falling mostly between November and March. The air carries fine dust from the western desert, and the light in the long dry season comes through pale and flat. Dawn and the half-hour after sunset are the hours the city looks longest along the river.