Diyarbakır
— — black walls the Tigris has watched for centuries.
Not only on a wall.
“Diyarbakır holds the upper bend of the Tigris from the inside of a circuit of black basalt walls almost six kilometres long. The stones came up out of the volcanic plateau behind the city, and in the late afternoon they carry the heat back out so the old town reads warm even after the sun is gone. Below the walls the Hevsel Gardens have been worked for eight thousand years. The Ten-Eyed Bridge still spans the river south of Mardinkapı. Tea in small glasses, slowly, the way the city likes it. — from the studio
Diyarbakır, 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.
Diyarbakır is the largest city in southeastern Turkey, with about 1.1 million people in the urban area, set on a basalt plateau above the Tigris River. It is the cultural and historical capital of Turkish Kurdistan and has been continuously inhabited for at least five thousand years, passing through Hurrian, Assyrian, Roman, Byzantine, Sassanid, Arab, Seljuk, and Ottoman rule. The city's defining feature is its city walls — a near-continuous circuit of black basalt 5.8 kilometres long, second in scale only to the Great Wall of China among ancient defensive walls. The walls and the Hevsel Gardens below them were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015.
The walls are the city. Built and rebuilt from the Roman period through the eleventh-century Seljuk era, they enclose a roughly oval old town and rise up to 12 metres high and 5 metres thick in places, punctuated by 82 watchtowers and four monumental gates — Harput, Urfa, Mardin, and Yenikapı — that still set the pattern of the streets inside. The basalt comes from the surrounding Karacadağ volcanic field, the same plateau where einkorn wheat was first domesticated. Inside the walls the Great Mosque of Diyarbakır, completed in 1091 on the site of a Roman temple, is the oldest mosque in Anatolia.
The Tigris bends around the south and east of the old city and gives Diyarbakır its second great asset — the Hevsel Gardens, a sixteen-hectare ribbon of cultivated terraces between the walls and the river that has been worked continuously for roughly eight thousand years. The gardens supply much of the city's produce and frame the approach to the On Gözlü Köprü, the Ten-Eyed Bridge, a basalt arch span finished in 1065 under the Marwanid dynasty. From the bridge the city walls rise nearly vertically out of the gardens, and the view back is the one most often painted.