An olive-green block, almost austere, its surface cracked like parched earth. You bring it to your nose before you even touch it: a woody, slightly animal scent, far removed from the perfumed foams our bathrooms have accustomed us to. Aleppo soap does not try to charm you straight away. Instead, it asserts its presence, like an object that has crossed the centuries without a care for fashion.
That is precisely what it has done.
A craft more than three thousand years old
The history of Aleppo soap is said to go back to late Antiquity, in the workshops of the old city of Aleppo, in northern Syria – one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Its recipe has, since then, barely changed: olive oil, laurel berry oil, water, and a plant-based soda extracted from desert plants such as saltwort. Nothing else. No dyes, no synthetic fragrance, no preservatives – just four ingredients, and a gesture refined over generations.
The making of the soap itself is a ritual of patience. Olive oil is poured into a sunken vat with water and the plant-based soda, then brought to the boil in huge copper cauldrons for several days running. Laurel oil is added only right at the end, in a quantity that varies according to the desired mildness. The still-warm paste is then spread directly onto the workshop floor, cut by hand into regular cubes, and stacked in an airy column pattern that allows air to circulate between each bar. The longest phase then begins: a natural drying period lasting from nine months to a year, during which the soap hardens, its green surface slowly turning to a golden beige at its core – the visual mark of an Aleppo soap that has had time to age properly.
A worldwide recognition, finally official
On 3 December 2024, UNESCO inscribed the craftsmanship of Aleppo Ghar soap – “ghar” meaning laurel in Arabic – on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. A recognition long awaited by artisans, joining other emblematic crafts already listed by the organisation, such as the French baguette or Spanish flamenco. According to UNESCO itself, between half and three-quarters of Aleppo's families remain connected, in one way or another, to the making or trading of this soap – a proportion that gives a sense of what this craft represents within the city's social fabric.
This inscription comes at a particularly fraught time for Syria, and for Aleppo in particular. The civil war, from 2011 onwards, hit production hard: the historic workshops at the heart of the old city were damaged, sometimes destroyed, and some soap-makers were forced to close or go into exile – to Turkey, Lebanon, and further still into Europe. Production, which had stood at several thousand tonnes a year before the conflict, was lastingly affected as a result. This context gives UNESCO's recognition a particular resonance: it celebrates not only a technique, but the survival of a trade that recent history has put through a severe test.
A craft passed from hand to hand
What is striking, when you look into the history of Aleppo soap, is just how much this know-how has never belonged to an industry, but to families. For centuries, the master soap-makers of Aleppo passed their methods down from father to son, never fully setting them down in writing – rather like Levantine recipes, whose true measure is found only in the hand of the person making them. Several of these soap-making families, some established since the 19th century, thus made it through the region's political and economic upheavals without ever abandoning the craft.
Among them, the Zanabili family is today one of the most frequently cited references of this tradition – a name that comes up again and again whenever the authentic making of Aleppo soap by the ancestral method is mentioned: copper cauldrons, hand-cutting, long drying. A story of family transmission that illustrates, better than any long speech, what it means to keep a craft alive through wars, exiles and redrawn borders.
A gesture we choose to carry on
It is this same rigour – unapologetic slowness, the refusal of industrial shortcuts – that we find in the soap we offer. A simple, unadorned block, whose colour and scent owe nothing to anything but the olive oil and laurel that make it up. To hold it in your hand is to hold an object that could have been made elsewhere, faster, cheaper – and that chose, like the saffron or honey that accompany it in our gift boxes, to remain true to the time it really takes to do things properly.
A craft now protected, a tradition that continues to reinvent itself from workshop to workshop – proof that some gestures, however ancient, have not finished crossing the centuries.
