Samarra
— — the spiral the desert keeps climbing.
Not only on a wall.
“The Malwiya rises 170 feet above the plain north of Baghdad, a spiral ramp of fired brick the colour of the desert it stands on. It was built in the 9th century for the Great Mosque of Samarra, briefly the largest mosque in the world. The city around it was the Abbasid capital for half a century. The minaret survived an explosion in 2005 that took its upper crown. The spiral itself still climbs.
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.
Samarra sits on the east bank of the Tigris in Salah ad-Din Governorate, about 78 miles north of Baghdad. The city was founded in 836 CE by the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim, who moved the capital here from Baghdad to house his Turkic guard. It served as the seat of the caliphate for fifty-six years before the court returned south. The archaeological site spans roughly 15,000 acres, the largest preserved planned city of late antiquity, and was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2007 under the name Samarra Archaeological City.
The Malwiya, the spiral minaret of the Great Mosque, was completed around 851 CE under the caliph al-Mutawakkil. It stands 171 feet high on a square base, with a clockwise ramp that climbs the outside of the cone in five turns. The mosque it served measured 256 by 158 metres at completion, briefly the largest in the world. The brick is sandy ochre, fired from local Tigris clay. An explosion in April 2005 damaged the upper crown. The spiral ramp itself remains intact.
Samarra is also the city of the Al-Askari Shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, which holds the tombs of the tenth and eleventh imams. The golden dome was destroyed by bombing in February 2006 and rebuilt by 2009. Annual pilgrimages tied to the lives of those imams bring hundreds of thousands of visitors. The shrine sits about a mile north of the Malwiya, in a city that has been rebuilt and re-bombed and rebuilt again across the past two decades.