İzmit
— — a Roman capital the earth still moves under.
Not only on a wall.
“A city at the eastern end of the Sea of Marmara, about ninety kilometres east of Istanbul, where the gulf narrows to a deep saltwater inlet. Under the name Nicomedia, it served as the eastern capital of the Roman Empire under Diocletian. The North Anatolian Fault runs beneath the gulf; the 1999 earthquake reshaped the waterfront overnight. The city has been rebuilt around what survived, and the fishing boats still come back into harbour before dark.
İzmit, 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.
İzmit is the capital of Kocaeli province in northwestern Turkey, on the northern shore of the Gulf of İzmit, the easternmost inlet of the Sea of Marmara. The metropolitan area holds roughly 400,000 residents and anchors one of Turkey's most heavily industrialised corridors, with petrochemical works, automotive assembly, and the Tüpraş refinery sitting along the gulf. Istanbul lies about 90 kilometres west along the E80 motorway. The Osman Gazi Bridge, opened in 2016, crosses the mouth of the gulf to the south.
As Nicomedia, the city was founded in 264 BC by Nicomedes I of Bithynia, and rose to become the eastern capital of the Roman Empire under Diocletian after 286 AD. Constantine briefly held court here before founding Constantinople in 330 AD. Surviving Roman fabric is fragmentary: sections of city wall, a Late Antique villa with mosaics excavated from 2009 onward, and the probable site of Diocletian's palace identified beneath the modern city. The Saatçi Ali Efendi mosque and several Ottoman-period fountains carry the later layers.
Every August 17 the city marks the anniversary of the 1999 Kocaeli earthquake. At 3:01 in the morning that summer, a magnitude 7.6 rupture on the North Anatolian Fault, with its epicentre near Gölcük just across the gulf, struck the dense industrial belt running from İzmit to Adapazarı. More than 17,000 people were killed across the affected provinces, and hundreds of thousands lost their homes. The Gölcük Memorial Park, with a section of the surface fault rupture preserved beneath glass, holds the public observance.