Derbent
— — a wall the sea and the mountains agreed on.
Not only on a wall.
“The southernmost city in Russia and one of the oldest continuously inhabited places anywhere, where the Caucasus drops to the Caspian in a corridor three kilometres wide. The Sasanians built two parallel walls across the gap in the sixth century, and the citadel of Naryn-Kala still holds the high ground above the old town. Below, the magal quarters keep their tenth-century plan. The sea is brackish here, and the wind off it stays cool even in July.
Derbent, 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.
Derbent stands on the western shore of the Caspian Sea in the Republic of Dagestan, southern Russia, about 130 kilometres south of Makhachkala and 40 kilometres north of the Azerbaijani border. The Caucasus Mountains close to within three kilometres of the coast here, and the city occupies that entire strip. Its population is around 125,000. The citadel of Naryn-Kala and the parallel city walls were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2003. The Sasanian king Khosrow I commissioned the present stone defences in the sixth century, replacing earlier mud-brick walls on the same line.
Two parallel stone walls run from the Naryn-Kala citadel on the hillside down to the Caspian, originally about three and a half kilometres long and enclosing the old town between them. The northern wall stands largely intact and reaches eighteen to twenty metres in places. The citadel itself encloses 4.5 hectares and contains a cruciform underground cistern, a sixth-century bathhouse, and the khan's palace. The Juma Mosque inside the city walls is one of the oldest in Russia, founded in 733 on the columns of a Christian basilica that stood on the site.
Summer is the season here, with temperatures running 25 to 30°C from June through August and the Caspian warm enough to swim. The wind off the sea keeps the city moderate even in heat. Derbent marked its officially recognised two-thousandth anniversary in 2015, a date set from the Sasanian foundation, though continuous settlement on the site reaches back to the fourth millennium BCE. The Derbent Wine Combine, founded in 1939 on older traditions of viticulture in the surrounding Tabasaran villages, runs cellar tours through the warmer months and produces the country's best-known Caspian-coast brandies.