Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro
— a dome the savannah can't quite hold.
Not only on a wall.
“The basilica was built between 1985 and 1989 on the savannah outside Yamoussoukro, the village President Houphouët-Boigny made the political capital. The architect, Pierre Fakhoury, modelled the dome after Saint Peter's in Rome and pushed it a little taller. Pope John Paul II consecrated the church in 1990. Seven thousand four hundred square metres of stained glass face the equatorial sun. From the road in, the colonnade reads as Rome that has wandered south.
Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro, 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.
The basilica stands on the western edge of Yamoussoukro, the inland political capital of Côte d'Ivoire, about 230 kilometres north of Abidjan on the coast. President Félix Houphouët-Boigny commissioned it in 1985 as a gift to the Catholic Church and to his home village, where he had been born around 1905. Construction took roughly three years. The Lebanese-Ivorian architect Pierre Fakhoury led the design. The Vatican accepted the building in 1990 as a minor basilica, on the condition that a hospital be built nearby.
The basilica occupies roughly 30,000 square metres of floor and exterior plaza, which makes it the largest church building in the world by area, ahead of Saint Peter's in Vatican City. The dome and cross rise about 158 metres above the savannah floor. The colonnade quotes Bernini's at Saint Peter's. Roughly 7,400 square metres of stained glass were cut in France and shipped to Yamoussoukro. Italian marble lines the floor; African iroko wood was used for the pews. Air conditioning runs beneath the seats.
The basilica is open to visitors outside service hours, and admission is free. Modest dress is required, as for any Catholic basilica. The drive from Abidjan takes around three and a half hours along the A3 motorway. Yamoussoukro itself, designated political capital in 1983, holds about a quarter of a million residents and remains low-rise around the basilica grounds. The Presidential Palace and the Houphouët-Boigny Foundation sit a short drive east; the artificial sacred lake stocked with crocodiles is the other set-piece in town.