Otrar
— — the Silk Road city that triggered the Mongol storm.
Not only on a wall.
“The mound and the brick foundations of Otrar, on the lower Syr Darya in the Turkistan Region. In 1218 the governor seized a Mongol caravan and killed its merchants. The empire that answered came in 1219 and besieged the city for five months. Otrar fell, was sacked, and never fully recovered. Wind and grass now.
Otrar, 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.
Otrar, also written Utrar or Farab, was a Silk Road oasis city on the Arys tributary of the Syr Darya river, in what is now the Turkistan Region of southern Kazakhstan. The site lies roughly 10 kilometres west of the modern village of Shaulder, and about 150 kilometres northwest of Shymkent. At its medieval height, under the Khwarezmian Empire, Otrar held tens of thousands of inhabitants and commanded the trade artery between Samarkand and the Aral Sea basin. The remains today form a low tell, partially excavated by Kazakh and UNESCO joint programmes since the 1990s.
In 1218 the Khwarezmian governor Inalchuq Qair-Khan accused a caravan dispatched by Genghis Khan of espionage, seized its goods, and ordered roughly four hundred and fifty merchants killed. Genghis sent envoys; they were murdered or mutilated. In 1219 the Mongol response began. The siege of Otrar lasted approximately five months. When the walls were breached in 1220 the city was sacked, its inhabitants massacred or enslaved, and Inalchuq was executed — according to the Persian historian Juvayni, by molten silver poured into his eyes and ears.
What survives is largely baked brick, mud brick, and the outlines of a citadel, congregational mosque, baths, and a craft quarter. The mausoleum of Arystan Bab, a thirteenth-century Sufi teacher of Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, stands roughly two kilometres east and remains an active pilgrimage site. The mausoleum of Yasawi himself, at the city of Turkistan, was raised at Timur's order in the 1390s in part on the strength of Otrar's continuing spiritual gravity. The tell itself is now a state-protected archaeological reserve, partly walkable along marked paths.