Marawi
— a city learning its own outline again.
Not only on a wall.
“The Islamic City of Marawi sits on the north shore of Lake Lanao, the largest lake in Mindanao. Maranao culture has held this ground for centuries, in carved torogan houses and in brass okir patterns nobody else makes. The siege of 2017 took the centre apart, and the rebuilding is slow. The lake still keeps its colour.
Marawi, 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.
Marawi is the capital of Lanao del Sur Province on the island of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, sitting at about 700 metres on the northern shore of Lake Lanao. Around 200,000 people live here, most of them Maranao, a Muslim ethnic group whose name means people of the lake. Marawi is the only city in the country officially designated an Islamic City, a title granted by Republic Act in 1980. The 2017 siege by Islamist militants destroyed much of the central district; reconstruction has continued through the 2020s.
Lake Lanao is the second largest lake in the Philippines and one of the fifteen ancient lakes in the world, with an age estimated at two million years. It covers about 340 square kilometres and reaches depths over 110 metres. The lake holds endemic cyprinid fish found nowhere else, several now critically endangered. For the Maranao, Lake Lanao is sacred ground: the lake of legends, of the Darangen epic, and of the brass and silk traditions that the surrounding villages still keep.
The Maranao year turns on Islamic observance and on the Darangen, an epic poem inscribed by UNESCO in 2008. Verses run to seventeen cycles, performed at weddings and at large gatherings, with brass kulintang gongs and silk malong wraps. Okir, the curving woodcarving tradition that decorates the prows of mosques and the eaves of torogan houses, belongs to Lanao alone. The Kambayoka theatre, a sung Maranao form, returned to Marawi after the siege as part of the city's recovery.