Dura-Europos synagogue
— — the painted room that should not have survived.
Not only on a wall.
“On a desert escarpment above the Euphrates, in a small house tucked against the western wall of a Roman frontier town, archaeologists in 1932 cut through a packed-earth embankment and found a room with painted walls intact on every side. A synagogue. Built around 244 CE. The figural panels — Moses at the well, the Ark crossing the Jordan, Ezekiel's valley of bones — were not supposed to exist, by every received rule of how Jewish communities of that age understood the second commandment. The earth that buried the building saved it. — from the studio
Dura-Europos synagogue, 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.
Dura-Europos sits on a desert plateau on the right bank of the Euphrates in what is now Deir ez-Zor Governorate, eastern Syria, about 90 kilometres downstream of the modern city of Deir ez-Zor. Founded around 300 BCE as a Seleucid garrison and later a Parthian and Roman frontier town, it fell to Sasanian siege around 256 CE and was never reoccupied. The synagogue stood against the western city wall and was buried under the defensive embankment thrown up during that final siege, which preserved its plaster walls in situ.
The painted assembly room was about 7.7 by 13.7 metres, with a Torah niche on the western wall facing Jerusalem. The walls carried more than fifty surviving figural panels in tempera over plaster, depicting Hebrew Bible narratives including the finding of Moses, the consecration of Aaron, the Ark's return from Philistia, the vision of Ezekiel, and Esther before Ahasuerus. An Aramaic dedication dates the painted decoration to 244-245 CE. Yale's joint expedition with the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters lifted the painted walls in 1935 and reassembled them in the National Museum of Damascus, where they remain.
The site itself is not currently accessible to general visitors. Eastern Deir ez-Zor Governorate has been a conflict zone since 2011 and the archaeological field at Dura-Europos was subjected to extensive looting between 2011 and 2014, documented by satellite imagery from the American Schools of Oriental Research. The painted walls of the synagogue, however, were lifted nearly a century earlier and remain installed in a reconstructed gallery at the National Museum of Damascus on Shukri al-Quwatli Street.