Great Mosque of Djenné
— — the year the town climbs its own walls.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest mud-brick building in the world, on a market-day island in the Bani River. Every spring, before the rains rise, the whole town climbs the palm-wood scaffolding and replasters the walls by hand. The mosque is rebuilt a little each year, in a single morning, by the people who pray in it. from the studio
Great Mosque of Djenné, 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 Great Mosque sits at the centre of Djenné, a market town on an island in the inland delta of the Niger, about 354 km southwest of Timbuktu. The current building dates to 1907, raised on the platform of a 13th-century mosque attributed to the conversion of Sultan Koi Konboro. Walls are sun-dried mud brick (ferey) packed with rice husks and rendered in banco plaster. UNESCO inscribed the Old Towns of Djenné, including the mosque, on the World Heritage list in 1988.
The walls reach roughly 16 metres at the qibla, studded with bundled palm-wood beams called toron that brace the structure and double as scaffolding. Three minarets rise from the eastern face, each capped with an ostrich egg. The harmattan dries the banco; summer rains erode it. Every year the Crépissage de la Grande Mosquée, held in the days before the wet season, draws the whole town to mix mud in the square and re-render the walls in a single coordinated morning.
Monday is market day in the square in front of the mosque, and the photograph most travellers know is taken then. Non-Muslims have been barred from the interior since 1996, after a fashion shoot inside the prayer hall, so the building is experienced from the surrounding square and rooftops. Djenné is reached by road from Mopti, about 80 km north, with a short ferry across an arm of the Bani. The Crépissage falls in April or May, depending on the rains.