Hafar Al-Batin
— — a town the caravan road remembered first.
Not only on a wall.
“A city in the high northeastern desert of Saudi Arabia, where the long dry course of Wadi al-Batin draws a faint green line through the gravel plain. For centuries it was a water stop on the caravan road from Basra to Najd, named for the hand-dug wells the bedouin sank into the wadi bed. The modern city grew up around those wells and around the military presence to the north. In summer the heat is honest; in late winter, after rain, the desert briefly greens. The horizon does most of the talking here.
Hafar Al-Batin, 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.
Hafar Al-Batin sits in the high northeastern desert of Saudi Arabia, in the Eastern Province, close to the borders with Kuwait and Iraq. The city takes its name from the Arabic for 'hand-dug wells of the wadi' — references to the bedouin wells once cut into the bed of Wadi al-Batin, the long ancient drainage course that runs past the town. It was historically a water stop on the caravan route between Basra and the Najd interior. Modern growth followed the opening of King Khalid Military City, roughly 60 kilometres to the north, in the 1980s. Population today is in the hundreds of thousands.
The climate is a hot desert one, with summer daytime highs that routinely exceed 45°C and winter nights that drop close to freezing. Rainfall is sparse, concentrated in late winter and early spring, and arrives in short hard cells that briefly green the wadi bed. Dust storms, the shamal winds out of the north, are a fact of the calendar from late spring into early summer. The air carries a faint scent of acacia and salt after rain, and a faint scent of dust the rest of the year. Travellers cross the desert by day and stop in town for the evening.
The surrounding desert is one of the quieter landscapes on the peninsula — a gravel plain with low ridges, scattered acacia, and the broad shallow trough of Wadi al-Batin running south-west to north-east. The wadi has been a route since prehistory and a tribal boundary in its modern memory; the bedouin who watered camels here named the wells the city took its name from. There is no obvious tourist circuit. People come through for work, for family, for the road north to the border at Al-Ruq'i, and for the date markets in season. The horizon does most of the talking.