Siverek
— the black-stone town that holds the heat.
Not only on a wall.
“A district town in Şanlıurfa Province, in southeastern Turkey, built on the black basalt skirt of the Karacadağ shield volcano. The houses are basalt, the castle wall above the bazaar is basalt, the rice fields below town grow out of basalt-weathered soil. Zaza, Kurmanji Kurdish, and Turkish are spoken in everyday life, all three at once depending on the corner of the market.
Siverek, 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.
Siverek is a district seat in Şanlıurfa Province in southeastern Turkey, between the Euphrates River to the west and the Karacadağ shield volcano to the east. The town sits at roughly 800 metres elevation on the basalt apron the volcano laid down across the upper Mesopotamian plain. The district population is around 250,000, with a Zaza-majority core in town and Kurmanji-speaking villages around it. The site has been continuously inhabited since at least the Assyrian period, under names close to the modern Siverek for most of that span.
The Karacadağ basalt is the substrate. The volcano last erupted roughly 11,000 years ago and laid down a basalt plateau covering several thousand square kilometres of upper Mesopotamia. Siverek Castle, on the high ground above the old town, is built from that black stone, and so are the older bazaar arcades and most of the courtyard houses in the historic core. The walls hold the day's heat through the evening, useful in winter and severe in late summer when the basalt radiates back at the sky long after dark.
Karacadağ einkorn wheat grew wild on this volcano's flanks, and DNA work published in 1997 traced cultivated einkorn back to populations here, a strong candidate for one of the founding crops of Neolithic agriculture. Today the same slope grows Karacadağ rice, a small-grain variety the slow-draining basalt soils favour. The harvest runs September through October, and the bagged rice sells through Siverek's covered market all winter. The Friday market draws villagers from the plateau and from the edge of the Euphrates valley.