Unguja
— — the spice island the monsoon brings home.
Not only on a wall.
“The larger of the two main islands of the Zanzibar Archipelago, thirty kilometres off the Tanzanian coast. Stone Town on the western shore, narrow lanes of coral rag and carved doors that have absorbed five hundred years of monsoon trade. Clove and cardamom still come out of the interior. The eastern beaches face the open ocean, and the dhows still sail the channel between the islands on the same wind that carried them to Oman.
Unguja, 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.
Unguja, commonly called Zanzibar Island, is the larger of the two principal islands of the Zanzibar Archipelago, lying about 30 kilometres off the Tanzanian mainland in the Indian Ocean. It covers roughly 1,666 square kilometres and holds nearly one million residents. The semi-autonomous region forms part of the United Republic of Tanzania. Zanzibar City on the west coast is the administrative seat; its historic core, Stone Town, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 as a World Heritage Site for its layered Swahili, Arab, Indian, and European built fabric.
Stone Town fills the western tip of Unguja, a dense quarter of coral-rag houses built between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Roughly 1,700 buildings stand within its narrow lanes, many with carved Zanzibari doors that blend Swahili, Arab, Indian, and European motifs. The House of Wonders, completed in 1883 for Sultan Barghash, was the first building in East Africa to have electric light and the first in Zanzibar with a lift. UNESCO inscribed the quarter as a World Heritage Site in 2000.
Two monsoon seasons shape the rhythm of the island. The long rains arrive in March and run through May; the short rains fall in November and December. Between them, the kaskazi from the north blows November to March and the kusi from the south blows April to October, the same trade winds that carried dhows between Zanzibar, Oman, and India for more than a millennium. Clove, cardamom, and nutmeg ripen in the interior plantations from August through October.