Olive oil, laurel berry oil and time. The craft behind Syria's most exported object, how a real bar is made, and how to tell one from a copy.
Aleppo soap is a hard, hand made bar of olive oil and laurel berry oil, cut into cubes, stamped with the maker’s family name and left to cure for months before anyone is allowed to use it. Syrians call it ghar, after the laurel that gives it its smell. It is the oldest surviving craft of a city that has been making things for a very long time, and in December 2024 UNESCO added it to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The curing is not a finishing touch. It is the whole craft, and you cannot hurry it.
The timing of that recognition is not something Aleppo will forget. The inscription came on 3 December 2024, days after the city was freed and five days before the regime fell in Damascus. A craft that had survived war, displacement and the 2023 earthquake was honoured in the same week its city began breathing again.
Four ingredients: olive oil, laurel berry oil, water and lye. Nothing else. No palm oil, no synthetic fragrance, no colouring, no hardening agents. The olive oil comes from the groves north and west of Aleppo, and the laurel berries are picked wild in the coastal mountains, boiled until they split so the oil can be skimmed off the top.
The laurel is what people pay for. A cheap bar might contain two per cent laurel oil, while the sought-after ones run to forty per cent or more. More laurel means a softer, gentler bar, a stronger herbal smell and a higher price. It is also why one Aleppo soap can cost four times what another does while looking almost identical on the shelf.
The other difference is time. Industrial soap is extruded and boxed within hours. An Aleppo bar is cooked, cut, stamped and then stacked in open towers for six to nine months, and sometimes as long as two years, while air moves through the gaps and the water slowly leaves. That curing is not a finishing touch. It is what makes the bar hard, mild and long lasting.
Fresh soap comes out of the vat bright green. As the bars cure, the surface oxidises and turns a dull gold or pale brown, while the inside stays green. Cut an aged bar in half and you get the answer to the question most buyers ask: a khaki crust and a green heart is the signature of a bar that has actually been aged. A bar that is bright green on the outside has either been coloured or never properly cured.
Before 2011 Aleppo had somewhere between 100 and 120 soap factories. By the mid 2020s only 10 to 15 were still working. Some were destroyed outright, some burned with the souqs, and many families carried what they knew across the border and began making soap in Gaziantep, Hatay and Idlib instead. That is the honest answer to a question a lot of buyers ask: a large share of the bars sold abroad as Aleppo soap are genuinely made by Aleppo families, using the Aleppo method, but not inside Aleppo.
Inside the city the craft has held on through families who have been at it for generations. The al-Jubaili family, who say they have made soap for around 700 years, rebuilt their factory twice in fifteen years. Since December 2024 makers have been returning, repairing and boiling again, and for the first time in a long while they are doing it in a free Syria.
The method has barely changed in centuries, and it runs on the calendar rather than a production schedule. Laurel berries are picked in autumn, the soap is boiled in winter after the olive harvest, and the bars are not sold until the following year.
In autumn, families gather wild laurel berries and boil them in water until they split, then skim the oil that rises to the surface.
From November, olive oil, laurel oil, water and lye are cooked together in a large vat heated from below. The cooking runs for hours or days depending on the workshop.
The green paste is rinsed with salted water, then poured straight onto the factory floor and smoothed flat to cool overnight into one enormous slab.
Craftsmen strap on large wooden shoes and walk the slab, dragging a rake or a blade frame, using their body weight to score it into cubes.
Each cube is struck with the family seal, in Arabic. The stamp is the maker signing the work, and it is the first thing to look for when buying.
The bars are built into open towers with gaps for the air, and left for six to nine months, sometimes far longer, until they are hard and mild.
Every bar carries the mark of the family that made it, pressed in by hand while the soap is still soft enough to take it. Before the war, Aleppines could tell workshops apart by their stamps the way you might recognise a signature. When you are holding a bar, the stamp is the quickest test there is: a clear Arabic seal means a named maker stood behind it.
The name is not protected in most countries, so anyone can print "Aleppo soap" on a wrapper. These are the checks that actually work, in a shop or online.
Aleppo soap is often called the oldest hard soap in the world, with claims running from 2,000 to 3,000 years. The claims are hard to verify, and we treat them as tradition rather than fact.
Soap houses are recorded in the Bab Qinnasrin quarter of Aleppo, later moving toward Bahsita, where olive oil arrived through the city gate.
Crusaders and traders carried Aleppo soap west, where it shaped the olive oil soaps later made famous in Marseille and Castile.
Aleppo's souqs burn and the factories close. Of roughly 100 to 120 workshops before the war, only 10 to 15 are still operating a decade later.
The craft is inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List on 3 December, days after Aleppo is freed and five days before the regime falls. Makers have been returning since.
The soap souqs and the workshops that supply them are part of the old city. Ask for sabun ghar and ask the laurel percentage before you buy.
Damascene brocade, inlaid wood, glassblowing and the other trades that survived alongside it.
Soap travels well and is one of the few things you can carry back in quantity. Plan the rest of the trip around it.
Four natural ingredients, a method that has barely changed in centuries, and months of curing before it is sold. The laurel berry oil is what sets it apart from every other olive oil soap, and it is why the bars smell the way they do.
Cut a bar in half. A genuine aged bar is gold or khaki on the outside and green inside. Then check for a hand-pressed Arabic stamp, a stated laurel percentage, and an ingredient list with only olive oil, laurel oil, water and lye.
A lot of it is. When the war closed Aleppo's factories, many soap-making families moved to Gaziantep, Hatay and Idlib and carried on there. Those bars are made by Aleppo makers using the Aleppo method, but not in Aleppo. If origin matters to you, ask where the bar was actually boiled.
Castile and Marseille soaps are olive oil soaps that descend from the same tradition, carried to Europe through trade. The difference is laurel berry oil, which only Aleppo soap contains, and the long open-air curing.
It is traditionally used for both, and bars with a higher laurel content are usually chosen for the face and hair because they are milder. It is a soap rather than a treatment, so patch test first and ask a professional if you have a skin condition.