Hargeisa
— — a city the country built back from its own ruins.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Somaliland sits at 1,300 metres on the Ogo plateau, rebuilt almost entirely after the war years of the late 1980s left it nearly flattened. The MiG monument at the city centre marks the planes that bombed it. Today the camel market on the south edge is one of the largest in the Horn of Africa, and the Laas Geel rock paintings, an hour east, hold images more than 5,000 years old.
Hargeisa, 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.
Hargeisa is the capital and largest city of Somaliland, a self-declared republic in the northwest of the territory recognised internationally as Somalia. It sits on the Hargeisa plateau at roughly 1,300 metres of elevation, about 130 kilometres south of the Gulf of Aden coast at Berbera. Population is estimated at well over a million, making it the second-largest urban centre in the wider Somali-speaking region after Mogadishu. The city was rebuilt almost entirely after Siad Barre's airforce bombed it in 1988, in what UN reports later characterised as a campaign against the Isaaq population.
The Laas Geel rock shelters, about 55 kilometres east of Hargeisa, hold some of the oldest preserved rock paintings on the African continent: pastoral scenes of long-horned cattle, herders, and dogs, executed in red, white, and black mineral pigments between roughly 5,000 and 11,000 years ago. The shelters were documented by a French archaeological mission in 2002 and are now protected by the Somaliland Department of Archaeology. The paintings sit beneath granite overhangs, sheltered from direct sun, which is the reason the colour survives at all.
Hargeisa Egal International Airport handles direct flights from Addis Ababa, Dubai, and Djibouti, and visas are issued on arrival through the Somaliland mission system. The dry season runs November through March; the long Gu rains hit April into June. Visitors travelling outside the city, including to Laas Geel and Berbera, are required to arrange a Special Protection Unit escort through the Ministry of Tourism. The currency in daily use is the Somaliland shilling, though US dollars are accepted in most hotels and at the camel market.