Bosra
— — a city the basalt remembers.
Not only on a wall.
“A black-stone city on the basalt plain of southern Syria. The Roman theatre at its centre, carved from dark volcanic rock in the second century, still seats fifteen thousand. The wider ruins sit half-buried under the modern town, columns rising between courtyards, a triumphal arch standing where a Roman main street once ran. UNESCO listed the old city in 1980. The basalt holds the day's heat into the night.
Bosra, 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.
Bosra is a town in the Daraa Governorate of southern Syria, about 140 kilometres south of Damascus and 40 kilometres from the Jordanian border. It sits on the volcanic basalt plain of the Hauran, at roughly 850 metres elevation. Settled in the third millennium BCE, it became capital of the Roman province of Arabia Petraea in 106 CE under Trajan. Later it served as a Byzantine archbishopric and a key Umayyad caravan stop on the route to Mecca. UNESCO inscribed the old city as a World Heritage Site in 1980.
Every old building in Bosra is cut from the same black basalt that underlies the Hauran plain. The stone is dense, slow to weather, and almost impossible to carve fast, which is why the Roman theatre, built into a hillside in the second century from blocks fitted without mortar, still stands at near-full height. It seats around fifteen thousand. In the early Ayyubid period the theatre was enclosed inside a fortress, which preserved the cavea from quarrying and left the structure in unusually complete condition.
Bosra was placed on UNESCO's List of World Heritage in Danger in 2013, after the Syrian conflict reached the southern Hauran. Several minarets and sections of the historic souk sustained damage; the Roman theatre itself remained largely intact. Site access has been intermittent since. The town is reached from Daraa, then south by road on the M5 corridor toward the Jordanian frontier. Travellers should check current advisories before any visit. The site is best seen in spring or autumn, when the basalt is not yet holding the full summer heat.