Ani
— — a thousand churches, and the wind through them.
Not only on a wall.
“Medieval Armenia's capital, built on a triangular plateau above the Akhurian River. At its peak around the year 1000, Ani held perhaps a hundred thousand people and a city full of churches. An earthquake in 1319 and the Mongol passage left it to the grass and the wind. The walls and cathedrals still stand on the steppe, and the closed border runs through the gorge below.
Ani, 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.
Ani sits on a triangular plateau in Kars Province, eastern Turkey, where the Akhurian River cuts the present-day border with Armenia. The medieval Armenian capital under the Bagratid dynasty from 961 to 1045, the city stood on a branch of the Silk Road and held an estimated population of around one hundred thousand at its peak. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2016 as the Archaeological Site of Ani. The nearest town is Kars, about forty-five kilometres west by paved road.
The buildings at Ani are cut from a local volcanic tuff that runs from a warm rose to a darker ochre, quarried from the same plateau the city stands on. The Cathedral of Ani, completed in 1001 to a design by the architect Trdat, who also restored the dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople after the 989 earthquake, keeps its tall pointed arches. The Church of the Redeemer split in half after a lightning strike in 1957. The Church of St Gregory holds painted frescoes inside.
Ani has no inhabitants. The Seljuk conquest of 1064, the 1319 earthquake, and the shifting of trade away from the Silk Road emptied the city by the seventeenth century. The border between Turkey and Armenia, closed since 1993, runs along the Akhurian below the walls, so the gorge is heard but not crossed. The grasslands carry the wind over the ruins without much interruption. Visitors come on the day road from Kars and almost always have long stretches of the plateau to themselves.