Istanbul
— — the city the call to prayer crosses.
Not only on a wall.
“A city laid across two continents along a strait sixty-three kilometres long. Domes and minarets crowd the old peninsula above the Golden Horn. Ferries cut between Eminönü and Kadıköy through the early haze and the gulls follow. Tea comes in small tulip glasses; the spice market keeps the same scent it has carried for centuries. A city that has been three capitals, photographed at the hour the light turns the Bosphorus copper.
Istanbul, 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.
Istanbul lies on either side of the Bosphorus, the strait that joins the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea and separates the European and Asian continents. It is Turkey's largest city, with a population over fifteen million, and the only major city on earth seated on two continents. Founded as Byzantium around 657 BCE and later refounded as Constantinople in 330 CE under Constantine the Great, the city served as capital of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires across nearly sixteen centuries. The historic peninsula carries UNESCO World Heritage listing.
Hagia Sophia, completed in 537 under Justinian I, holds a dome rising fifty-five metres above the floor on a span of thirty-one metres, a structural feat unmatched for nearly a thousand years. Across the square the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, finished in 1616, answers it with six minarets and twenty thousand blue İznik tiles inside the prayer hall. Below the old city the Basilica Cistern, built in 532, holds three hundred and thirty-six marble columns in a chamber that once supplied water to the Great Palace.
The Bosphorus runs roughly thirty-one kilometres from the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea, narrowing to seven hundred metres at its tightest point. Public ferries have crossed continuously since the mid-nineteenth century, and the commuter routes between Eminönü, Karaköy, Üsküdar, and Kadıköy still carry more than a hundred thousand passengers daily. The Golden Horn cuts seven kilometres inland from the strait, forming a sheltered harbour the city has used for trade since antiquity. The current always runs south.