Tarsus
— — the city Paul came from.
Not only on a wall.
“A city in southern Turkey, in Mersin Province, on the Cilician plain between the Taurus Mountains and the Mediterranean. Paul of Tarsus was born here. Cleopatra is said to have sailed up the river to meet Mark Antony here in 41 BCE. Cleopatra's Gate still stands at the western edge of the old town. A stone well in the courtyard of a Roman house is shown to visitors as the well of Saint Paul.
Tarsus, 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.
Tarsus lies in Mersin Province on the Cilician plain in southern Turkey, about twenty kilometres inland from the Mediterranean coast and ninety kilometres east of Adana. The Berdan River, the ancient Cydnus, runs through the city after descending from the Taurus Mountains to the north. Tarsus has been continuously inhabited for more than four thousand years, with documented Hittite, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Armenian, and Ottoman layers. A Roman road exposed in the city centre passes a few metres below the modern street.
Cleopatra's Gate, also called the Kancık Kapısı, is the only surviving gate of the Roman city wall and stands at the western edge of the old town in basalt and limestone. It is traditionally identified as the gate through which Cleopatra entered the city in 41 BCE on her way to meet Mark Antony. A nearby Roman-era stone-lined well in a sunken courtyard, Saint Paul's Well, has drawn Christian pilgrims since the medieval period, and a paved section of the Roman cardo lies exposed under glass two blocks east.
The Apostle Paul names Tarsus as his birthplace in the book of Acts and describes himself there as a citizen of no mean city. The city had been a centre of philosophy and rhetoric in the late Hellenistic period, and Strabo writes in the early first century that its schools rivalled those of Athens and Alexandria. After the Arab conquests of the seventh century it became a frontier outpost, was retaken by the Byzantines in 965, and passed through Armenian Cilician, Mamluk, and Ottoman hands before joining the Turkish Republic.