AMMAN // Amin Halaf has lived in the same neighbourhood since he was a child. Al-Muhajireen clings to the side of Mount Qasioun, overlooking both old and new Damascus from the west.
For 30 years, Amin, 53, has produced and sold a variety of Syria’s treasured traditional handicrafts, including the country’s renowned with mother of pearl- inlaid furniture and ornate lanterns. Foreigners from far and wide came to buy his wares from his shop on Bab Sharqi Street (which translates as “Straight Street) in Damascus, a street so ancient that it appears in the Bible, in Acts, the fifth book of New Testament.
Diplomats based in Amman and Beirut were among his biggest customers. But four years ago, relatively peaceful revolution in Syria turned to war. Acquiring materials and simply moving around became ever more difficult and Amin decided to close down his shop.
The future, not only for him but for the great master craftsmen of his beloved Damascus looked bleak.
But against all odds, Amin has managed to keep those artisan traditions alive — and keep a few good men in work into the bargain.
Of course, he also needed a little luck and his came in the form of Catherine Ashcroft, a Briton working with the Mercy Corps in Amman. She fell in love with Amin’s work before the war after seeing the furniture a colleague of her husband had bought from him. Three years ago, she began selling Amin’s work for him in Amman.
“People have had whole bedrooms and dining rooms designed by [Amin], and the reason is because of the quality of the work,” she says.
Her involvement saved not only Amin’s livelihood but those of the few remaining craftsmen in Damascus who work with him.
“She [Catherine] has done me the biggest favour,” says Amin. “It’s unbelievable that there are some people existing on the earth like her.”
Before the war, Amin had a network of 14 craftsmen spread across Damascus and its suburbs who would work together to create and perfect a piece of furniture. With workshops in the city’s rebel-held suburbs forced to close under siege, only a handful of each of the craftsman integral to the process are still working in Damascus: a few carpenters and specialist carvers, a mosaic artist, three mother of pearl inlayer, and the final worker in each piece, a polisher.
Amin estimates that while there used to be almost 3,000 mother of pearl inlayers working in Damascus, there are only 10 per cent of them left now in all Syria
Initially, Catherine sold the delicate handcrafted brass lanterns made by Amin’s colleague Abu Ahmad in Aleppo, and used the money raised to help Palestinian refugees. But the lantern-maker was forced to leave Aleppo when the bombardment of the city began. He now repairs cars in Turkey where sadly, no one wants to buy his lanterns.
Amin’s entree into the furniture business came at the age of 11, when he was apprenticed to a carpenter in Muhajireen. He went on to study English literature at university in Damascus, where a meeting with an old neighbour led to a job in a family carpet business. The young Amin knew nothing about the carpet business, but he knew English. A month later, however, he quit over a misunderstanding with the owners. But two years later, the family asked him to return and Amin turned himself into a carpet expert, reading everything he could about the thousands of varieties.
His reputation in furniture-making also came about by accident ten years later, in the late nineties. A friend working with the US embassy in Beirut asked Amin to visit the embassy and bring a couple of carpets, as embassy workers were not permitted to travel. He did and a few weeks later, one of the American diplomats from Beirut came seeking his expert help on sourcing carpets and furniture to take back to his home in the US.
“I wasn’t really interested in furniture at that time,” says Amin. But his time as a carpenter’s apprentice had taught him about quality — and there was little of it to be found. “I basically had to tell him it was all rubbish,” says Amin. The diplomat then asked Amin if he would make the furniture for him instead. Some of the craftsmen he found to work on those first pieces are with him still.
But his reputation is little help in overcoming the hurdles the conflict throws up. Hold-ups at government checkpoints when moving pieces between different artisans mean it can take eight months to make each piece of furniture. Completed pieces used to take three days to reach Amman by road. But the land border with Jordan is closed so it now takes at least 50 days by sea to reach the Red Sea port of Aqaba and costs eight times more. Pieces often get lost in customs. Shipping to the US takes more than two months.
While his workshops are located in regime-controlled Damascus, the materials needed — especially the high quality walnut wood — come from besieged Ghouta, 18km east of Damascus.
“Syrians have used this wood for the past few hundred years. Other wood doesn’t work with these handicrafts … There’s a life in this wood,” says Amin. “There are walnut trees all over [Syria], but in Damascus they are the best. It’s the quality of the soil and the rain here “
But very little wood has made its way out since the siege began. “Nobody can afford to smuggle the wood, so it’s all really leftovers,” says Amin. In fact, in Ghouta they’re more likely to burn the wood for fuel, buying it at inflated prices on the black market.
Likewise, the Euphrates river mother of pearl used by Syrian craftsmen as disappeared from the market. Instead, Amin relies upon imported mother of pearl from the Philippines, which costs at $30 (Dh110) per kilo now compared to around $20 (DH73) in the past.
The successful years before the war mean Amin can still live comfortably and was able to afford to pay a people smuggler to get his wife and daughter to Germany 18 months ago via a dangerous sea crossing.
He stayed on to care for his 91-year-old mother and the craftsmen who have worked with him for almost 20 years and who would have no income without him. It also saddens him that with so many craftsmen gone and no one to replace their skills, the traditions may well die. So he will keep going “even if there is no market”, he says. “I can’t let people down. Those carvers, carpenters … I can’t just say, ‘khalas’… - enough. I’m working for them [and] they need the money. So I think I’m not going to stop.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
