Eskişehir
— — a river city carved from soft white stone.
Not only on a wall.
“A university city on the Porsuk River, roughly halfway between Ankara and Istanbul. The Odunpazarı quarter on the south bank holds row after row of restored Ottoman timber houses, painted in soft greens and ochres, climbing the slope above the water. Eskişehir is the principal world source of meerschaum, the soft white stone called lületaşı in Turkish, carved here into pipes and small figurines since the eighteenth century. A high-speed train from Ankara takes about ninety minutes. from the studio
Eskişehir, 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.
Eskişehir is the capital of Eskişehir Province in north-western Anatolia, roughly 230 kilometres east of Istanbul and 230 kilometres west of Ankara. The Porsuk River, a tributary of the Sakarya, runs through the city centre and has been canalised, gondola-poled, and crossed by more than a dozen short bridges. The municipality holds roughly 900,000 residents and is home to two large universities, Anadolu and Eskişehir Osmangazi, which between them enrol well over 100,000 students. The city sits at about 790 metres elevation on the Anatolian plateau, on the historic line between the Aegean coast and the interior.
The white stone for which the region is famous is sepiolite, a soft hydrated magnesium silicate that the Turkish trade calls lületaşı, literally pipe-stone, and that the wider world calls meerschaum, German for sea-foam. The bulk of the world's commercial meerschaum has historically been mined from shafts around the village of Sepetçi, a half-hour drive north of the city. Carvers in the Odunpazarı quarter still work the blocks by hand into pipes, beads, and small figurines, the stone soft enough to shape with a knife when freshly cut. The Lületaşı Museum, in a restored Ottoman house, shows the trade end-to-end.
The fastest approach is the YHT high-speed train from Ankara, about 90 minutes, or from Istanbul Pendik, about 2 hours 40 minutes. The Odunpazarı district climbs the south bank of the Porsuk and is best walked: narrow cobbled lanes, the Kurşunlu Mosque complex of 1525, and the Odunpazarı Modern Museum, a 2019 timber-clad building by Kengo Kuma. Sazova Park, on the western edge of the city, holds a glass museum and a children's science centre. Trams run on a single ring through the centre; a flat fare covers the network and connects the station, the universities, and the old town.