Al-Fashir
— — the old Fur sultan's town, on the road from the desert.
Not only on a wall.
“The historic capital of North Darfur, in the arid west of Sudan. Al-Fashir, meaning *the court* in Arabic, was the seat of the Fur Sultanate from the late eighteenth century until 1916. The Tendelti reservoir lies at the town's centre and the old palace stands on its bank. The town has been under siege through the recent civil war; the streets it remembers are not the streets of this season.
Al-Fashir, 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.
Capital of North Darfur state in western Sudan, on the semi-arid plateau between the Nile valley and the Sahel. Elevation is roughly seven hundred metres. The town grew around the Tendelti, a natural depression that holds rainy-season water. Al-Fashir was the seat of the Sultanate of Darfur from 1791, when Sultan Abd al-Rahman al-Rashid moved his court here, until the British annexation of Darfur in 1916. The population before the recent civil war was estimated at over two hundred sixty thousand, drawn from Fur, Zaghawa, Arab, and other Darfuri communities.
The Palace of Sultan Ali Dinar, the last sultan of Darfur, stands on the northern shore of the Tendelti reservoir. Built in the early 1900s and held by Ali Dinar until his death in 1916 at the hands of British forces, it became the Sultan Ali Dinar Museum after Sudanese independence — one of the country's few regional museums, holding manuscripts, royal regalia, and weaponry of the sultanate. The Great Mosque of al-Fashir, just south of the palace, dates from the same period and still anchors the old quarter of the town.
At the centre of al-Fashir lies the Tendelti, a seasonal reservoir formed in a natural depression that catches the summer rains. It is the reason the town exists where it does. The Fur sultans built their court along its northern shore in the late eighteenth century, and market gardens still ring its banks in years the rains arrive on time. In a region of less than three hundred millimetres of annual rainfall, the Tendelti is the difference between a settlement and a way-station on the camel routes north.