Adana
— — a river city that cooks over fire.
Not only on a wall.
“A southern Turkish city where the Seyhan River cuts through cotton and citrus country and the kitchens send up smoke after dark. The Roman Taşköprü still carries pedestrians across the same span it has since the second century. Across the water, the six minarets of the Sabancı Central Mosque catch the afternoon light. The long-skewer Adana kebab was named here and is still cooked over open coals along the riverside lanes most evenings.
Adana, 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.
Adana is Turkey's fifth-largest city, set on the Seyhan River in the Çukurova plain about 30 km from the Mediterranean coast. The metropolitan area holds roughly 2.3 million residents. The plain is one of the country's most productive agricultural regions, growing cotton, citrus, and cereals on alluvial soil between the Taurus Mountains and the sea. The city has been continuously inhabited for at least three thousand years, with successive Hittite, Roman, Byzantine, Armenian, Ottoman, and modern Turkish layers visible across the centre.
The Taşköprü, the Stone Bridge, crosses the Seyhan with 14 surviving arches and is among the oldest functioning bridges in the world; the Roman structure is generally dated to the second century under Hadrian, with later repairs. A few hundred metres downstream the Sabancı Central Mosque, completed in 1998, holds six minarets and a 32-metre central dome, modelled on classical Ottoman precedent. The city's older quarter rises behind it, a low-rise grid of mosques, churches, and the 16th-century Ulu Camii with its black-and-white striped stonework.
The southern climate runs hot: summer highs commonly clear 35 °C and the river runs slow in August. Spring and autumn are the open seasons, when the plain greens and the citrus comes in. The Adana kebab, the long hand-minced lamb skewer cooked over charcoal, was officially registered by the Adana Chamber of Commerce in 2005 and is served with sumac, grilled long green pepper, and şalgam, the fermented purple-carrot drink of the Çukurova. The river lanes around Taşköprü are the easiest place to find the proper version after sundown.