Raqqa
— — a city remembering itself, brick by brick.
Not only on a wall.
“A river city in northern Syria, on the north bank of the Euphrates. Once briefly the seat of the Abbasid caliphate under Harun al-Rashid in the late 8th century. Heavy damage from the 2017 battle for the city, and reconstruction has been slow and uneven. The Baghdad Gate and the Qasr al-Banat still stand in fragments. The studio's piece looks back to the medieval city the river still remembers.
Raqqa, 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.
Raqqa sits on the north bank of the Euphrates in north-central Syria, about 160 kilometres east of Aleppo. The pre-war population was roughly 220,000. The city was briefly the capital of the Abbasid caliphate under Harun al-Rashid, who moved his court here from Baghdad between 796 and 809 AD. The modern city was the seat of self-declared ISIS rule from 2014 until October 2017, when a five-month battle by the Syrian Democratic Forces and a US-led coalition ended that occupation. Reconstruction has continued unevenly since. Raqqa now sits within the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
Three Abbasid-era monuments survived into the modern era and remain visible in fragmentary form. The Baghdad Gate, a brick gateway on the southern wall, dates to the late 8th or early 9th century. The Qasr al-Banat, the Palace of the Maidens, retains four iwans around a courtyard and detailed stucco work. The Great Mosque of Raqqa, originally built under al-Mansur in 772, was rebuilt by Nur ad-Din in 1165 and 1166. Sections of its minaret and wall remain. All three suffered damage in the 2017 battle and earlier conflict. Documentation and stabilization efforts continue.
The Euphrates here is wide and slow, gathered behind the Tabqa Dam 40 kilometres upstream, a Soviet-built earthen dam completed in 1973 that formed Lake Assad, Syria's largest reservoir. Raqqa's relationship to the river predates the Abbasids by millennia. The broader bend has been settled since the Bronze Age, with Tell Bi'a, ancient Tuttul, on the city's northern edge. The river continues to carry irrigation across the Jazira plain north and east of the city. Spring flow is heaviest in March and April, and the banks below Raqqa hold cultivated land in normal years.