Written by Elizabeth Mika
Founder and Maker, Bramble & Bear™ Soap Co.
There are places where soap is more than something made, wrapped and sold.
In Aleppo, Syria, it is part of the city’s memory.
For centuries, families have made the distinctive olive-and-laurel soap known as Aleppo soap, or ghar soap. Large batches are cooked, poured across factory floors, cut and stamped, then stacked into remarkable towers where air moves between the bars as they slowly dry.
War disrupted that rhythm. Factories were damaged. Workers left. Infrastructure and supply networks were strained.
And yet, the soap is still being made.
In 2026, Reuters documented laurel-soap production continuing in Aleppo while producers were still dealing with unreliable electricity, damaged infrastructure, higher production costs and a shortage of skilled workers after years of migration.¹
The bars may look simple.
The story behind them is anything but.
What Is Aleppo Soap?
Aleppo soap is a traditional hard soap made primarily from olive oil and laurel oil. It takes its name from Aleppo, Syria, where this centuries-old soapmaking tradition has been passed down through generations.
The process itself is striking. Olive oil, laurel oil and alkali are cooked together, and the soap is poured across the floors of traditional factories to cool into a vast slab.
It is then cut into individual bars, stamped and stacked into tall towers or pyramids so air can circulate around them. Traditional Aleppo ghar soap dries for approximately six to nine months.
In 2024, UNESCO inscribed the Craftsmanship of Aleppo Ghar Soap on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — recognizing not simply the finished soap, but the knowledge and traditions involved in making it and passing the craft from one generation to another.²
A Soap Shaped by Place — and Supply
Aleppo soap may have a simple ingredient list, but the story behind those ingredients reaches beyond the factory.
Historically, olive oil came from groves surrounding Aleppo, while laurel oil used by soapmakers also came from the mountains of southern Turkey. An AramcoWorld report from 2010 described one soapmaking season being delayed when a shipment of laurel oil was held at Turkish customs.³
It is a small detail that reveals something much larger.
A traditional bar of soap can depend upon harvests, raw materials, transportation, borders, energy, skilled workers and generations of knowledge.
War can put every part of that system under pressure.
By late 2024, Al Jazeera reported that only about 15 soap factories remained from roughly 120 before the war, showing how severely Aleppo’s traditional soap industry had contracted.⁴
Buildings can be repaired. Equipment can be replaced.
Knowledge is harder to replace.
Traditional crafts contain skills learned through repetition — understanding the materials, recognizing stages of a process and knowing techniques that may never be fully captured on a formula sheet.
When those skills disappear, something much harder to rebuild can disappear with them.
More Than a Bar of Soap
That is what makes Aleppo soap so compelling.
It is an ordinary object carrying an extraordinary amount of history.
Within one bar are agriculture, chemistry, geography, trade, craftsmanship and generations of accumulated knowledge.
Its survival therefore means more than getting a product back onto a shelf. It means preserving the resources, knowledge and traditions that allow the product to exist in the first place.
Why We Are Telling This Story at Bramble & Bear
Bramble & Bear does not make Aleppo soap.
Our soaps are handcrafted in Texas using our own formulas, ingredients and small-batch process. Aleppo ghar soap belongs to its own people, place and centuries-old tradition — and that distinction matters.
But its story speaks to something we find increasingly relevant today.
Soap can be more than a commodity.
Traditional soaps around the world often carry an identity connected to place — Aleppo ghar soap in Syria, Savon de Marseille in France, and other regional soapmaking traditions developed from their own materials, methods and histories.
Today, there is also a renewed appreciation for traditional, handcrafted true soap — soap made through saponification, with attention to ingredients, formulation and the craft behind how it is made.
Bramble & Bear belongs to a much newer and very different soapmaking tradition. But we share that larger belief in soap as a craft.
A bar can represent a carefully developed formula, a particular method of making and a connection to the much older tradition of turning oils and alkali into true soap.
That is why stories like Aleppo matter to us.
They remind us that traditional soapmaking is not simply something preserved in history.
It is a living craft — and one people are discovering again.
Sources
1. Reuters, March 2026, “Some Syrians Return Home to Launch Businesses Despite Challenges”; 2. UNESCO, 2024, “Craftsmanship of Aleppo Ghar Soap”; 3. AramcoWorld, July/August 2010, “Soaping Up”; 4. Al Jazeera, December 26, 2024, “Aleppo’s Soap Makers, Now Making Their Soaps in a Free Syria.”
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