Sivas
— stone schools standing through eight winters and eight more.
Not only on a wall.
“A high plateau city in central Anatolia, founded long before the Seljuks but defined by them. Three medreses from the 1270s still face the central square: Çifte Minareli, Gök, and Şifaiye, each carved in pale tuff and patterned with cobalt tile. The Sivas Congress of 1919 was held here. Winters are long, the air dry, the schools still standing.
Sivas, 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.
Sivas sits on the central Anatolian plateau at about 1,285 metres, near the headwaters of the Kızılırmak, Turkey's longest river. The city has roughly 370,000 residents and is the capital of Sivas Province. It lies 440 km east of Ankara on the E88 highway and the Ankara to Kars rail line. Settled since at least the Hittite period and known to Rome as Sebasteia, the city rose to its present form under the Seljuks of Rum in the 13th century, when it briefly served as a co-capital.
Three Seljuk medreses face one another across the Konak Meydanı. The Şifaiye Medresesi was founded in 1217 by Sultan Izzeddin Keykavus as a teaching hospital, the earliest Anatolian institution of its kind still standing. Across the square, the Çifte Minareli (1271) keeps only its façade and the twin brick minarets that name it. Beside it, the Gök Medrese, also of 1271, carries some of the finest stone carving in Anatolia, designed by Kaluyan al-Konavi for the vizier Sahip Ata.
From 4 to 11 September 1919, Mustafa Kemal convened the Sivas Congress in the assembly hall of the Sivas Lycée. Thirty-eight delegates from across Anatolia and Thrace adopted the resolutions that would steer the Turkish War of Independence and, by October 1923, the founding of the Republic. The building is now the Atatürk Congress and Ethnography Museum, free to enter and open daily except Mondays from morning until late afternoon.