Tripoli
— — a Mamluk old city the sea still leans on.
Not only on a wall.
“The second city of Lebanon, set on a wide bay roughly eighty-five kilometres north of Beirut. Above the old town stands the Citadel of Raymond de Saint-Gilles, begun by the Crusaders and rebuilt under the Mamluks. The streets below run with soap khans, madrasas, and hammams from the fourteenth century. Beyond, the small port of El Mina opens to the Mediterranean. from the studio
Tripoli, 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.
Tripoli is Lebanon's second-largest city, home to roughly half a million people. It sits on the Mediterranean coast about eighty-five kilometres north of Beirut, between the slopes of Mount Lebanon and the port district of El Mina. The historic core climbs the hill below the Citadel of Raymond de Saint-Gilles, a fortress begun by the Count of Toulouse during the Crusader siege of 1103 and rebuilt under successive Mamluk and Ottoman rulers. The old city below holds one of the largest concentrations of Mamluk-era civic architecture surviving anywhere in the Levant.
The Mamluks rebuilt Tripoli in stone after taking the city from the Crusaders in 1289, and much of that fourteenth-century work still stands. The old quarter holds the long Khan al-Saboun, where soap is still made and sold, the Great Mosque of Tripoli on the site of an earlier cathedral, several historic madrasas, and the deep vaults of the Hammam al-Jadid. The masonry alternates pale local limestone with bands of darker basalt — a Levantine technique called ablaq. Restoration since the civil war has been uneven, but the bones of the medieval city remain unusually legible underfoot.
Tripoli is reached by road from Beirut, about an hour and a half north on the coastal motorway when traffic is light. The citadel sits at the top of the old town and charges a small entry fee; the souks below are open through the day and quieter on Fridays before noon. South of the centre stands the Rachid Karami International Fair, an unfinished modernist complex designed by Oscar Niemeyer between 1962 and the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, inscribed by UNESCO in 2023 as a World Heritage site in danger.