Orontes River
— — the river that runs the wrong way home.
Not only on a wall.
“The headwaters sit in the Beqaa Valley of eastern Lebanon, near the town of Hermel and the karst spring the Arabs call Ain al-Zarqa. From there the river runs north, against the grain of every other river in the Levant. The Arabic name is al-Asi, the rebel. It carries through the gorge below the Krak des Chevaliers and into Syria's Ghab plain, then into Turkey, and finally to the Mediterranean below Antakya. Reeds. Old waterwheels. A run of about five hundred and seventy kilometres before the sea. from the studio
Orontes River, 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 Orontes rises in the Beqaa Valley of eastern Lebanon, fed by the karst spring at Ain al-Zarqa near the town of Hermel. It runs roughly 571 kilometres north through Syria's Ghab depression and into Turkey's Hatay Province, emptying into the Mediterranean near Samandag, below the ancient city of Antioch. The Lebanese headwaters lie in the Baalbek-Hermel Governorate at about 900 metres of elevation, with the river falling steadily as it crosses the Syrian border near Qusayr. It is one of the few significant rivers in the Levant.
The local Arabic name is Nahr al-Asi, the rebel river, given because it flows north when the other rivers of the region flow south. The Lebanese headwaters are a karst system: the spring at Ain al-Zarqa surfaces from the limestone of the Anti-Lebanon range with a cold, even discharge that holds through the dry summer. Below Hermel the river meets the older noria waterwheels at Hama in Syria, some of them more than seven hundred years old, that lift the water into stone aqueducts above the channel.
The Lebanese stretch of the river is reached from Baalbek by the road north toward Hermel, about an hour by car, with the spring and the old hermitage of Mar Maroun in the gorge nearby. Most of the river's course lies in Syria, where current travel advisories from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada warn against non-essential travel as of mid-2026. The Turkish stretch around Antakya is accessible, though the city is still rebuilding after the February 2023 earthquake.