Taq-i Kisra
— — the arch that outlasted its empire.
Not only on a wall.
“What stands at Ctesiphon is one wall and an arch. The palace it belonged to is gone, the river has moved, the capital is gone. The vault is the largest single span of unreinforced brickwork in the world, and it has been holding itself up for roughly fifteen hundred years. The Sasanian kings who raised it ruled an empire that briefly rivalled Rome. Pilgrims and travellers walk under it; the brick is the colour of the desert it came from.
Taq-i Kisra, 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.
Taq-i Kisra, also called Taq Kasra or the Arch of Ctesiphon, is the surviving great hall of the Sasanian royal palace at Ctesiphon, on the east bank of the Tigris about 35 kilometres south-east of Baghdad in modern-day Salman Pak. Ctesiphon served as the imperial capital of the Parthian and then Sasanian Persian empires for roughly eight centuries, until the Arab conquest in 637 CE. The arch is the only major above-ground remnant of what was once a vast palatial city, and Iraq has placed the site on the UNESCO World Heritage tentative list.
The iwan, the open vaulted hall, rises about 37 metres at its crown and spans roughly 26 metres clear with no reinforcement, the largest single-span vault of unreinforced brickwork ever built. The walls are about seven metres thick at the base, tapering as they climb. The brick is the river clay of the Tigris, fired ochre. The structure was built sometime between the third and sixth centuries CE; scholars most often attribute its present form to Khosrow I, who ruled from 531 to 579. The south wing collapsed in a 1888 flood; the north wing and the central arch still stand.
Ctesiphon was sacked by the Romans more than once, rebuilt each time, and finally taken by an Arab army under Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas in 637, after which the Sasanian state collapsed within a few years. The capital moved north to Baghdad under the Abbasids in the eighth century, and Ctesiphon was steadily quarried for its brick. The arch survived in part because its scale made dismantling impractical. Today the site sits in a quiet stretch of palm groves and farmland along the Tigris; the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage oversees ongoing conservation.