Trabzon
— — a Byzantine city looking north into the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“The old Trebizond. A port city on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea, with the Pontic Mountains pressing down at its back and the water carrying the weather in from the north. Inland and up the Altındere valley, the Sumela Monastery clings to a cliff face. The light is northern, cooler than the rest of Turkey, often soft with sea haze. from the studio
Trabzon, 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.
Trabzon sits on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea, in the historic region the Greeks called Pontus. The modern city has a population of roughly 800,000 and serves as the capital of Trabzon Province. From 1204 to 1461 it was the seat of the Empire of Trebizond, the last Byzantine successor state to fall to the Ottomans. The Pontic Mountains rise immediately south of the coast, cutting the city off from the Anatolian plateau and giving it a wetter, cooler climate than almost anywhere else in Turkey.
Forty-eight kilometres south of the city, the Sumela Monastery hangs on a cliff face in the Altındere valley at roughly 1,200 metres elevation. It was founded in the late fourth century and rebuilt many times; the present complex dates largely from the thirteenth century onward, when the Komnenoi emperors of Trebizond endowed it. Inside the city, the Hagia Sophia of Trabzon — a thirteenth-century Byzantine church now restored as a mosque — still carries some of the finest Pontic frescoes that survive anywhere.
The Black Sea sets the city's terms. Trabzon receives roughly 830 millimetres of rain a year, more than twice the Anatolian average, because the Pontic range traps maritime air against the coast. The result is the deepest green forest in Turkey, hazelnut groves running for hundreds of kilometres, and a low cloud that often sits on the upper slopes until midday. The port has been worked since antiquity; the city was a terminus of the Silk Road branch that crossed the Caucasus and a major Ottoman trading harbour into the nineteenth century.