UNESCO honors Syria's famous handmade soap

Aleppo soap is considered the most ecological soap and is recommended for babies. Instead of animal fats, Aleppo soap is made from olive oil, laurel seed oil.

On December 3, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) decided to include the famous handmade soap of Aleppo city, Syria on the list of intangible cultural heritage, in the context that Syria's second city is once again devastated by conflict.

Craftsmen make the product using 3,000-year-old “traditional knowledge and skills,” according to UNESCO, relying on a combination of natural, locally produced ingredients and a drying process that can take up to nine months.

Assessing the essentiality of soap to communities here, UNESCO said that "the collaborative production process promotes community and family cohesion."

With its rough appearance, Aleppo soap is considered the most ecological soap and is recommended for babies. Instead of animal fat, Aleppo soap is made from olive oil, laurel seed oil.

In particular, Aleppo soap requires a lot of processing time: 3 days to cook the oil mixture into soap, but it takes 9-12 months to dry.

Before the conflict in Syria, soap production in Aleppo was an important industry in Syria, with an output of 20,000 tons/year in 2010.

However, the fighting caused soap production to plummet to just a few dozen tons per year. The conflict also dispersed producers.

Of the 100 soap factories in the city, only about 10 remain in operation, many have moved to Damascus or neighboring Türkiye which have similar climatic conditions for production, but they are also facing high production costs.

Recent violence has also raised concerns about the impact on the city's newly recovering economy.

In addition to soap opera, Al-Qudoud al-Halabiya, a traditional musical genre of Aleppo, is also on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage.

The city of Aleppo itself was recognized as a world heritage site in 1986 - and was placed on the list of endangered heritage sites in 2013 amid the prolonged conflict./.

(Vietnam+)

Source: https://www.vietnamplus.vn/unesco-vinh-danh-xa-phong-thu-cong-noi-tieng-cua-syria-post999068.vnp