Palmyra
— — the colonnade the desert kept.
Not only on a wall.
“An oasis halfway across the Syrian desert, where a long colonnaded street still runs east toward the temple precinct of Bel. For three centuries Palmyra grew rich routing caravans between Rome and the Persian Gulf, and the limestone city the merchants built outlasted the empire that taxed it. Queen Zenobia ruled here in the 270s before Aurelian's legions came. Much of what stood in 2010 was damaged in the war years that followed; the long colonnade still casts its shadow across the sand, and the date palms still hold the spring under the ridge.
Palmyra, 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.
Palmyra, in Arabic Tadmur, sits in an oasis in the central Syrian desert, about 215 kilometres northeast of Damascus and 155 kilometres east of Homs. The site occupies a low basin at roughly 400 metres elevation, fed by the Efqa spring, which made the city a critical stop on the caravan road between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. The ruins were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2013 after the start of the Syrian civil war.
The Great Colonnade runs roughly 1.1 kilometres east-west through the heart of the ancient city, lined with Corinthian columns that once carried bracketed statues of Palmyrene notables. At its eastern end stood the Temple of Bel, consecrated in 32 CE; at the south, the Temple of Baalshamin, completed in 131 CE. Both temples and the standing Arch of Triumph were dynamited during the Islamic State occupation of 2015-2017. The Roman theatre, the agora, and long stretches of the colonnade itself remain standing under continuing conservation by Syrian and international teams.
Palmyra reached its height in the third century under Queen Zenobia, who briefly broke the city away from Rome and ruled a short-lived empire reaching into Egypt and Anatolia. The emperor Aurelian retook the city in 272 CE and sacked it the following year. Trade had already begun to shift; by the seventh century Palmyra was a minor Umayyad outpost. The modern town of Tadmur, built beside the ruins in the twentieth century, was largely emptied during the 2015-2017 occupation and reconstruction work is ongoing under Syrian and UN-coordinated programmes.