SEE
Al Joubaili Soap Factory
Sh Baba Qinnasrin, across from Bimaristan Arghun
Old City
Aleppo
The hours are unpredictable—if it’s closed, try asking the neighbors—but it’s worth taking a chance, as this factory is still making soap the old-fashioned way: with olive oil and bay laurel. In the vaulted rooms, amidst ratty sacks, old boxes, and rusted barrels, you can watch workers stir a pool of the heavy mixture with a wooden paddle, then head upstairs, where the amiable owner will let you stamp the soap with a rubber mallet.
Copper Market
King Faisal Street
Damascus
As consumers eschew traditional goods in favor of cheaper, factory-made products, and fewer young people become craftsman, Syria’s handicraft industry is steadily declining. In no sector is this more apparent than copper, but here on King Faisal Street you can watch workers melting and molding copper into pots as small as teacups or as large as jacuzzis.
Ayyam Gallery
Mezzeh West Villas
30, Chile Street
Samawi Building
Damascus
www.ayyamgallery.com
Surrounded by such antiquity—the countless mosques, tombs, ruins, gates, and khans—you just might need an dose of post-modernity. If so, retreat to the hip, spotless Ayyam Gallery, which, though it opened just a few years ago, has supplanted the Atassi Gallery as the city’s top contemporary art space—one of the finest, in fact, in the Arab world. The 5,000-square-foot Ayyam exhibits today’s most accomplished Middle Eastern artists, a necessary counterpoint to the centuries-old art that dominates most of the capital.
