Hyderabad
— — the city the wind was built to cool.
Not only on a wall.
“A city of bangles and ajrak block-prints, where the old houses still wear mungh — the wind-catchers that pull the river breeze down into the rooms below. The Pacco Qillo holds the centre, mud-brick and quiet, the Talpur mirs sleeping in their tile-work tombs nearby. Late afternoon, Rani Bagh fills with families, and the call to prayer carries across the low rooftops toward the Indus. from the studio
Hyderabad, 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.
Hyderabad sits on the east bank of the Indus in Sindh, about 150 kilometres northeast of Karachi, and is the second-largest city in the province. It was founded in 1768 by Mian Ghulam Shah Kalhoro, who built the Pacco Qillo (Pakka Qila) on a low ridge above the river and made the new town the Kalhora capital. The Talpur dynasty followed, leaving the tile-work tombs of the Mirs on the city's eastern edge. Today it remains the commercial centre of lower Sindh, linked to Karachi by the M-9 motorway and by the main Karachi to Peshawar rail line.
Hyderabad summers are among the hottest in Sindh, regularly above 40 degrees Celsius from May into June. The old quarters answered this with mungh — square wooden wind-catchers on every rooftop, angled toward the south-west sea breeze that climbs the Indus most afternoons. The wind enters the tower, falls through the house, and leaves through the courtyard. Whole neighbourhoods of these chimneys still stand in the lanes around the Pacco Qillo, the wood weathered grey by a century of monsoon. The breeze itself has a local name, the Karachi Hawa.
The city's craft year turns on two industries. Hyderabad makes a reported nine out of every ten glass bangles worn in Pakistan, the furnaces of the Churi Para working through the night and shipping by the truckload before each wedding season. The second is ajrak, the indigo-and-madder block-printed cotton that is Sindh's signature cloth, dyed in long open-air tanks along the Indus and finished in courtyards across the old city. Both trades are family-held, passed father to son, and both feed the bazaars around Shahi Bazaar and Resham Gali.