Jubail
— — a coastline the desert keeps half hidden.
Not only on a wall.
“A working city on the Gulf, with a quieter shore than its refineries suggest. Mangroves still hold the tideline north of town, and the ruined stones of a fourth-century church sit in the sand outside Jubail proper. The light here is flat at noon and long at evening, the kind that makes the water and the salt-pan read the same colour.
Jubail, 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.
Jubail sits on the western shore of the Persian Gulf, about 100 kilometres north of Dammam in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province. The modern city is split into the old town and Jubail Industrial City, the latter built from open desert beginning in 1975 under the Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu. It is now one of the largest petrochemical complexes in the world. The coast around it carries mangrove flats and shallow tidal pools that predate any of it, and the shoreline still draws fishermen out of the small harbour at dawn.
A few kilometres outside the city, in the sand, lie the remains of a small church dated to the fourth century — among the oldest Christian structures ever found on the Arabian Peninsula. The Jubail Church was uncovered in 1986 and is attributed to the Church of the East, the Nestorian tradition that once reached from Mesopotamia to the Gulf coast. The walls are low and bleached, the floor plan still legible. Access has been intermittently restricted, and the site remains largely unsignposted, sitting quietly in a country whose public history rarely mentions it.
The Gulf at Jubail is shallow, warm year-round, and rimmed by mangrove stands that the Saudi Wildlife Authority has worked to protect and replant since the 1990s. Avicennia marina, the grey mangrove, is the dominant species and holds the silt against the tide. Offshore, the shallows feed a working fishery — hammour, shrimp, and the small silver fish sold at the corniche market each morning. The water reads green-grey near the mangroves and a pale blue further out, with the haze of the refineries always somewhere on the horizon.