Aleppo: After years of war, the scent of laurel oil once again wafts from a small soap workshop in Aleppo, signalling the revival of a landmark trade in the battered northern city. Surrounding soap workshops in the Al Nayrab district still lie in ruins, badly damaged in the four-year battle for the former rebel stronghold. But for Ali Shami, hanging up his apron was not an option. “I never stopped making soap throughout the war — even if it was just a little,” says the 44-year-old, who fled his home city during the fighting. “But this workshop is special,” he said. “It was here that I started more than 30 years ago.”
Shami reopened his soap workshop last month after shutting it down in 2012, when Syria’s second city became a main front in the eight-year-long conflict. The scars of war are still visible on the building, its walls punctured with holes caused by shelling. Rushes of wind gust through the gaps. Shami carried out limited renovations — just enough to produce more than half of his pre-war output of around 800 tonnes a year. He installed a new metal door and refurbished the main rooms where the soap mixture is heated and then poured out to dry. He watches as five workers stir a thick mixture of olive and laurel oil in a large vat. Beside them, another five workers slice cooled and hardened green paste into cubes and stack them in staggered racks. Shami says he was able to resume operations quickly because Aleppo soap is handmade.
Its production “relies on manual labour, a successful mixture, the passion of Aleppo’s residents, and their love of the profession”, he says. After closing down in 2012, Shami tried to continue his work in other major Syrian cities. “My existence is tied to the existence” of soap, he says. He moved to the capital, Damascus, and the regime-held coastal city of Tartous, but Shami says the soap was not as good. Shami, who inherited the soap business from his father and grandfather, boasts about the superior qualities of Aleppo soap, the oldest of its kind in the world. “Aleppo soap distinguishes itself from other soaps around the world as it is made almost entirely of olive oil,” he says. — AFP
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