Khan Yunis
— — a city that began as a caravan inn.
Not only on a wall.
“A city in the south of the Gaza Strip, eight miles north of the Egyptian border, named for the fourteenth-century caravanserai that gave its travellers shelter on the road between Damascus and Cairo. Olive and almond groves once spread west toward the dunes; the old market threads east from the stone arches of the inn. The name carries six hundred years of road travel through the Levant.
Khan Yunis, 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.
Khan Yunis is a city in the southern Gaza Strip, about 25 kilometres south of Gaza City and 13 kilometres north of Rafah on the Egyptian border. It serves as the administrative seat of the Khan Yunis Governorate. Pre-2023 population figures placed it at roughly 200,000 residents within the city and over 350,000 in the wider governorate, the second largest urban area in the Strip. The land slopes gently from the coastal dunes inland to fields once given over to olives, citrus, and grain.
The city takes its name from the Khan of Yunis, a Mamluk caravanserai built around 1387 by the emir Yunus al-Nawruzi al-Dawadar on the coastal road between Damascus and Cairo. The square stone inn enclosed a courtyard with stables, sleeping rooms, and a small mosque, and served the Hajj and trade caravans for centuries. A portion of the original walls and the entrance gate, with its Mamluk inscription, still stood at the centre of the old city before recent damage.
Khan Yunis grew outward from the inn through the Ottoman centuries as the surrounding land was planted in olive and almond groves. Under the British Mandate after the First World War, and then Egyptian administration from 1948 to 1967, the city absorbed a large refugee population, and a UN-administered camp was established on its northern edge. The governorate became part of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. Olive harvest in October and almond bloom in February once marked the agricultural year.