Misrata
— — the port the date palms walk down to.
Not only on a wall.
“The third largest city of Libya, on the central Mediterranean coast about 210 kilometres east of Tripoli. A merchant city of long standing, the old suq still trades carpets and gold along the lanes off Tripoli Street. The port at Qasr Ahmad runs the country's largest free-trade zone. East of town the date palms run down to the sea at Ghiran, and the shoreline turns pale.
Misrata, 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.
Misrata stands on the Mediterranean coast of Libya, roughly 210 kilometres east of Tripoli, at the eastern edge of the Tripolitanian coastal plain and just before the desert turns toward the Gulf of Sirte. The city is the capital of Misrata District and the third largest in the country, with a population over three hundred thousand. Its port at Qasr Ahmad, eight kilometres east of the centre, holds the largest free-trade zone in Libya and is the main steel-shipping outlet of the Libyan Iron and Steel Company.
The old city is built around the suq off Tripoli Street, a covered market of carpet and goldwork still trading along the lanes laid down in the Ottoman period. The Sidi Darghut mosque, named for the sixteenth-century corsair-admiral who served the Ottomans in the central Mediterranean, anchors the historic quarter. Beyond the old town the broad avenues of the twentieth-century city run out to the Italian colonial-era cathedral, now used as a mosque, and further east to the port at Qasr Ahmad.
The coastline east of the city, around Ghiran and Zawiyat al-Mahjub, runs in long pale beaches between the date palms and the sea. The water is the warm clear Mediterranean of the central basin, and the local fishing fleet still works tuna and grouper close to shore. The port itself sits in a sheltered anchorage at Qasr Ahmad protected by long breakwaters; west of town, the salt flats of the Tauorga depression run inland toward the desert margin and the start of the Gulf of Sirte.