Mount Herzl
— — the country's quiet, kept under pines.
Not only on a wall.
“The hill where Israel keeps its founders and its fallen. Theodor Herzl is buried at the summit, his black basalt slab catching the late afternoon light through the Jerusalem pines. The military section steps down the western slope in long, even rows. Yad Vashem holds the next ridge. On Memorial Day a siren stops the country for two minutes, and the hill is the place the country looks toward.
Mount Herzl, 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.
Mount Herzl rises to roughly 834 metres in West Jerusalem and serves as Israel's national cemetery and civic memorial hill. Theodor Herzl, the Viennese journalist who organized the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, was reinterred at the summit in 1949, one year after the state was founded. The hill now holds the graves of prime ministers, presidents, and the country's military fallen, along with the adjacent Yad Vashem complex on the next ridge.
Herzl's tomb at the summit is a single block of polished black basalt incised only with the Hebrew letters of his name. The simplicity is deliberate. The military cemetery below uses a uniform pale Jerusalem-limestone marker for every grave, regardless of rank, in long terraced rows that follow the western slope down toward the Jerusalem Forest. The architect Asher Hiram shaped the layout in the early 1950s.
Two days a year the hill defines the country. On Yom HaZikaron, Israel's Memorial Day, a two-minute siren at 11 a.m. stops traffic on every road in the country, and the official ceremony is held at the military section here. The following evening the national Independence Day ceremony lights twelve torches at the plaza near Herzl's tomb. Outside those days the pines, the gravel paths, and the visiting school groups carry the place quietly.