Ta'izz
— — a white city the mountain holds up to the wind.
Not only on a wall.
“Yemen's third city, climbing the lower slopes of Jabal Sabir at roughly fourteen hundred metres. The old quarter pales to bone-white under the noon sun, then warms toward apricot as the shadow of the mountain lengthens across the rooftops. The minarets of Al-Ashrafiya and Al-Muzaffar carry the call to prayer down into the souks. The city has been held a long time.
Ta'izz, 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.
Ta'izz sits in the southwestern highlands of Yemen at roughly 1,400 metres, climbing the northern flank of Jabal Sabir, which rises to about 3,070 metres above the city. It is Yemen's third-largest urban centre, after Sana'a and Aden, with a population estimated above 600,000 before the conflict that began in 2015. The city was the seat of the Rasulid dynasty from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, and the old quarter still carries that period's mosques, gates, and madrasas along its terraced lanes.
Two Rasulid-era mosques anchor the old city. Al-Ashrafiya Mosque, completed in the early fifteenth century, holds twin slender minarets and a domed prayer hall whose interior was once covered in painted calligraphy and floral medallions. Al-Muzaffar Mosque, the older of the two and dating to the thirteenth century, sits lower on the slope with thicker walls and a heavier silhouette. Both have taken damage during the recent fighting, and both have remained, structurally, on the slope where they were built.
The altitude shapes the city's weather. At 1,400 metres the nights cool sharply even in summer, and the daytime light reads thin and white rather than the heavier coastal haze of Aden, roughly 250 kilometres south. Cloud sometimes settles on the upper face of Jabal Sabir while the city below stays in sun. The qat farms that ring the lower terraces depend on this elevation, and on the seasonal monsoon moisture that crosses from the Indian Ocean each summer.