Mount Judi
— — the mountain the flood waters set down on.
Not only on a wall.
“A long granite ridge above the town of Cizre, near where Turkey, Syria, and Iraq meet. In one old tradition, the ark came to rest here, not on Ararat. Pilgrims still walk up. Shepherds still graze the lower slopes. The river runs the same colour it ran a thousand years ago, and nobody up there hurries.
Mount Judi, 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.
Cudi Dağı rises about 2,114 metres above the plain of Cizre in Şırnak Province, southeastern Turkey, a long limestone-and-basalt ridge that looks south toward the Tigris and the Iraqi border. The mountain is named in the Qur'an, in Surah Hud verse 44, as the resting place of Noah's ark — a tradition older than the Christian identification with Mount Ararat, and one local Kurdish and Assyrian communities have kept since at least the early Islamic centuries. Modern Cizre sits at its foot and remains the natural starting point for any approach.
The summit ridge is a weathered limestone shoulder threaded with basalt, rough underfoot and bare of trees above about 1,600 metres. Pilgrim cairns and small stone shelters mark the upper paths, some attributed to Nestorian Christian monks who kept a monastery on the mountain into the medieval period. The Assyrian king Sennacherib left a rock relief at the base of the mountain in the seventh century BCE. The stone holds writing the way the mountain holds its story, quietly and in layers.
The villages on the lower slopes, Sherif Khan and Hasana among them, are small, and the upper mountain belongs mostly to shepherds and the wind. Border tensions through the late twentieth century kept casual tourism away for decades, which is part of why the place still reads the way it does. Pilgrims who make the climb on the traditional dates go in small groups, with food and water carried up. There is no road to the summit. The quiet on top is the kind that has been there a long time.