Mardan
— — a valley city in the lee of Buddhist ruins.
Not only on a wall.
“A flat, fertile city on the Peshawar Valley plain, ringed by sugarcane and tobacco fields and watched from the north by the Takht-i-Bahi ridge. The Sudher and Kalpani streams cross town; brick bazaars run from the railway line out toward the cantonment. Old Gandharan Buddhist monasteries sit in the hills a short drive away, weathered to the same colour as the rock. Cricket on the maidan, mosques on every corner, the smell of charcoal kebab off Bank Road. A working city the tourist circuit rarely stops in.
Mardan, 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.
Mardan is the second-largest city of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, after Peshawar, with a 2023 census population of about 358,000 in the city proper and over 2.7 million in the wider district. It sits on the Peshawar Valley alluvial plain, fed by the Kalpani and Sudher streams that drain south into the Kabul River. The city is the headquarters of Mardan District and a long-standing agricultural trade centre for sugarcane, tobacco, and wheat. The British-era cantonment was established in 1854 as the base of the Corps of Guides.
Mardan sits inside the old Gandharan heartland. The Takht-i-Bahi monastery, 15 kilometres northwest of the city, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1980; the complex was founded in the 1st century CE and used into the 7th. The ruins of Sahri-Bahlol, a fortified town of the same period, lie a short distance south and shared the same monastic economy. The schist sculpture from these sites, now spread across the Peshawar and Lahore museums, defined the Greco-Buddhist artistic style of the Kushan era.
Mardan is reached by the M-1 motorway from Peshawar in under an hour, or from Islamabad in roughly two and a half hours. Most foreign visitors come for Takht-i-Bahi and the nearby ruins rather than the city itself; the site is open from sunrise to sunset and the climb from the parking lot is about 20 minutes on a stone path. The Bacha Khan University campus, opened in 2012 and named for Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, sits on the southern edge of the city. Summers are hot and dry; the cooler months from November to March are the practical window.