Kairouan
— — the city the desert built around a well.
Not only on a wall.
“An old caravan city on the dry plain inland of Sousse, the fourth holy city of Sunni Islam and the oldest Arab-Muslim foundation in the Maghreb. The Great Mosque stands at the centre of the medina behind sand-coloured walls, its courtyard paved by a thousand years of footsteps. Around it the streets thread between low whitewashed houses and the carpet workshops the city has been known for since the Ottoman beys. Outside the walls the Aghlabid basins still hold rainwater. Beyond that, the Sahel grasslands stretch flat toward the Chott el Jerid.
Kairouan, 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.
Kairouan sits on the inland plain of central Tunisia, about 160 kilometres south of Tunis and 60 kilometres west of Sousse on the Mediterranean coast. It is the seat of Kairouan Governorate and the historical centre of the Tunisian Sahel. The city was founded in 670 CE by the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi as a forward base for the Umayyad conquest of the Maghreb and grew into the political and religious capital of Ifriqiya under the Aghlabid dynasty in the ninth century. The medina has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1988.
The Great Mosque of Kairouan, the Mosque of Uqba, is the oldest place of worship in the Islamic west still in continuous use, founded with the city in 670 and rebuilt to its present form by the Aghlabid emirs in the ninth century. Its hypostyle prayer hall stands on 414 reused Roman and Byzantine columns drawn from the ruins of Carthage and Sbeitla, and its three-tiered square minaret, completed in 836, is the oldest surviving minaret in the world. The whole medina remains enclosed by 3.2 kilometres of restored ramparts.
The Aghlabid emirs built a hydraulic system to keep a desert capital alive: a network of stone basins fed by an aqueduct from the Jebel Cherichira hills 36 kilometres to the west. The largest of these, the Great Basin, is roughly 128 metres across and was completed under the emir Abu Ibrahim Ahmad around 862 CE. The basins were filled by gravity flow, settled out the silt in a smaller pool, and held drinking and bath water for the city. They are still standing on the northern edge of the medina, now part of the UNESCO inscription.