Ashgabat
— — a city rebuilt in white marble.
Not only on a wall.
“The capital of Turkmenistan, set between the Kopet Dag mountains and the Karakum desert. After a 1948 earthquake levelled the old town, the city was rebuilt slowly in white marble, ranks of facades along long boulevards. Guinness lists more white marble here than anywhere else on Earth.
Ashgabat, 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.
Ashgabat sits about twenty-five kilometres north of the Iranian border, in the narrow plain between the Kopet Dag range and the Karakum desert. The metropolitan population is roughly one million. The Russian Empire founded the settlement as the fortress of Askhabad in 1881; it became capital of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924, and of independent Turkmenistan in 1991. Water reaches the city from snowmelt in the Kopet Dag and from the Karakum Canal, the long Soviet-era diversion that carries water across the desert from the Amu Darya.
On 6 October 1948 an earthquake measuring 7.3 in magnitude destroyed nearly every building and killed an estimated 110,000 people. Reconstruction stretched across the second half of the twentieth century. From the late 1990s the government clad ministries, museums, and apartment blocks in white Carrara and Turkmen marble. In 2013 Guinness World Records recognised 543 marble-clad buildings within the city, covering some 4.5 million square metres of facade, the largest concentration of white marble architecture in the world.
The climate is hot desert. July highs regularly exceed thirty-eight degrees Celsius, while January nights drop below freezing. Annual precipitation is around 230 millimetres, most of it falling between November and April. The Kopet Dag rises south of the city to 2,940 metres at Mount Rizeh, often holding snow into May. North of the city the Karakum, one of the largest sand deserts in Asia, extends nearly to the Aral Sea basin. Dust storms from the desert are common in spring.