Kilwa Kisiwani
— — a port the Indian Ocean kept and forgot.
Not only on a wall.
“A small island in the Indian Ocean off the southern Tanzanian coast, reached by dhow from the mainland village of Kilwa Masoko. For four centuries it was one of the wealthiest trading ports in the western Indian Ocean, moving gold from Great Zimbabwe across the sea to Arabia and India. What remains is coral-stone: the Great Mosque, the cliffside palace at Husuni Kubwa, low walls dissolving back into the bush.
Kilwa Kisiwani, 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.
Kilwa Kisiwani is a small coral-rag island off the coast of Lindi Region in southern Tanzania, about three hundred kilometres south of Dar es Salaam. From roughly the eleventh to the sixteenth century it was the seat of the Kilwa Sultanate and the principal east African trade gateway for gold from Great Zimbabwe and ivory from the interior. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta stopped there in 1331 and called it among the finest cities he had seen. UNESCO inscribed the ruins as a World Heritage Site in 1981.
The Great Mosque of Kilwa, begun in the eleventh century and rebuilt under Sultan al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman in the early fourteenth, is the largest mosque on the Swahili coast and uses domes carved from coral. The palace at Husuni Kubwa, north of the village, rises over an Indian Ocean cliff with an octagonal bathing pool and an audience court of more than a hundred rooms. The building stone is coral rag bound with lime burned from the same coral.
Kilwa today is a quiet fishing island of a few hundred residents. The ferry from Kilwa Masoko runs across a two-kilometre channel that drops into deep water on the seaward side; tides reshape the sandbars between crossings. The ruins sit among baobab and casuarina, undisturbed except by goats and the call to prayer from the modern mosque beside them. Most visitors arrive on day trips from Kilwa Masoko, and the island holds no hotel of its own.