Aleppo
— — stone that remembers every century it has stood through.
Not only on a wall.
“One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, on a low rise above the Quweiq River about a hundred kilometres east of the Mediterranean. The citadel sits on a mound that has held a fortress for at least four thousand years. The covered souk below it ran for roughly thirteen kilometres before 2012. Parts have been rebuilt; the city is finding its hours again.
Aleppo, 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.
Aleppo lies in northern Syria, about 350 kilometres north of Damascus and a hundred kilometres from the Mediterranean coast, at the meeting of trade routes between Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and the sea. Habitation on the citadel mound has been dated to the third millennium BCE, making the city one of the oldest continuously inhabited urban sites in the world. The walled old city, roofed by the Al-Madina souq, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1986. The Battle of Aleppo (2012 to 2016) damaged much of it; restoration is ongoing under the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities.
The citadel is the heart of the old city, a fortified mound rising about fifty metres above the surrounding plain. Its present medieval form was built under the Ayyubid sultan Az-Zahir Ghazi around 1200, on layers reaching back to the Bronze Age. The limestone vaults of the Al-Madina souq stretched roughly thirteen kilometres beneath the citadel walls and the Great Mosque. That mosque, founded in the 8th century with a Seljuk minaret added in 1090, lost its minaret in April 2013; reassembly from the recovered stones began in 2017.
Aleppo's calendar runs on its markets and its mosques. The souq's covered alleys have moved soap, spice, silk, and pistachio nuts since the Mamluk period; Aleppo soap (laurel-and-olive ghar) is documented from at least the 8th century. Fridays gather worshippers at the Great Mosque, and Ramadan reshapes the trading day around iftar. Christian neighbourhoods around Al-Jdayde keep their own Easter and Christmas calendars. Most of the souq's restored sections reopened in stages between 2018 and 2024 under work led by the Aga Khan Trust.