Peshawar
— — a city that has been a city for two thousand years.
Not only on a wall.
“The old capital of the Vale, set where the road from Kabul comes down out of the mountains. Qissa Khwani, the Storytellers' Bazaar, still runs the length of the inner city. The Mahabat Khan Mosque holds its white marble courtyard above the lanes. The light off the Khyber hills carries a thin dust through most of the afternoon, and the call to prayer reaches a long way over the rooftops.
Peshawar, 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.
Peshawar is the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the largest city of northwest Pakistan, set at the eastern mouth of the Khyber Pass on the broad Vale of Peshawar. The city sits about 160 kilometres west of Islamabad and roughly 50 kilometres east of the Afghan border. The metropolitan population is over 2.3 million. Peshawar is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in South Asia, with archaeological roots going back at least two thousand years to the Kushan-era city of Purushapura.
The Mahabat Khan Mosque, built in the 1670s under the Mughal governor Nawab Mahabat Khan, is the architectural heart of the old city, with a white marble courtyard and three low domes above the prayer hall. The Bala Hisar Fort, on a low rise at the northern edge of the inner city, has been rebuilt repeatedly since at least the Durrani period in the eighteenth century. Sethi Mohallah, a quarter of carved wooden havelis built by Central Asian trading families in the nineteenth century, still holds several restored houses open to visitors.
Qissa Khwani Bazaar, the Storytellers' Bazaar, runs through the heart of the old city and was for centuries the rest stop for caravans coming down from Kabul. The bazaar is still organized by trade, with separate lanes for copper, cloth, dried fruit, and tea. The Peshawar Museum holds one of the world's most important collections of Gandhara Buddhist sculpture, gathered from sites across the Vale. Summer afternoons routinely exceed 38°C; the cooler season runs roughly November through March and is the practical window for walking the inner city.