Aleppo Soap & Antioch

One Tradition, Two Cities

If you've ever bought a bar of Aleppo soap, you'll know it's not like other soap. It's dense, a little rough around the edges, and it smells faintly of bay leaves and green olives. It's also one of the oldest soaps people still use today. Here's where it comes from, what makes a good one, and why ours is made just over the modern border, in Antioch.

What is Aleppo soap?

Aleppo soap is a hard bar made from two oils: olive oil and laurel oil, pressed from the berries of the bay laurel tree. In Arabic it's often called ghar soap, ghar being the word for laurel. The oils are cooked slowly in large kettles, poured out, left to set and cut by hand. Traditionally the bars are then stacked and left to cure, which is why a real Aleppo bar is so hard and lasts so long.

Nobody knows exactly when it was first made. It's old enough that the origin has been lost, and plenty of legends have filled the gap. What we do know is that it was made across this corner of the eastern Mediterranean for centuries, wherever olive groves and laurel trees grew side by side. In 2024, the craftsmanship of Aleppo ghar soap was added to UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Why the laurel matters

Laurel oil is what makes Aleppo soap Aleppo soap. It gives the bar its herbal scent and its character, and it's also the most expensive ingredient, so the amount used varies a lot. Most Aleppo soap on the market contains somewhere between 2% and 20% laurel oil, and anything above about 16% is generally thought of as high quality.

Ours contains 40% laurel oil. That's well above what you'll usually find, and it's the main reason it has become our best-selling bar.

Two cities, one tradition

Aleppo and Antioch, today's Antakya, are only about 100 km apart. For most of their history they weren't really separate places at all. Under the Ottomans, Antioch was a district of the province of Aleppo. After the First World War it was briefly attached to the State of Aleppo, and it only became part of Turkey in 1939.

The two cities shared the same olive groves, the same laurel-covered hills, the same trade routes and the same families of craftsmen. Antioch even has its own laurel legend: the ancient suburb of Daphne, now Harbiye, is where the Greeks believed the nymph Daphne was turned into a laurel tree. Laurel soap is still one of the things Hatay, the province around Antakya, is best known for in Turkey.

So when we say our Aleppo soap is made in Antakya, we don't mean it's an imitation of something from somewhere else. It's the same soap, from the same tradition, made in the other city that has always made it.

Where Aleppo soap is made today

The war in Syria hit Aleppo's soap workshops hard, and many soapmakers left the city. A good deal of the Aleppo soap sold around the world today is now made in Turkey, in the towns and cities along the border that share the same craft. Some of Aleppo's workshops have since reopened, which is good news for anyone who cares about this tradition.

How to tell a good Aleppo soap

•       Check the laurel percentage. If it isn't stated, it's probably low.

•       Look at the ingredients. Real Aleppo soap is olive oil and laurel oil, turned into soap. No perfume, no colouring, nothing else needed.

•       It should feel hard and heavy for its size, not waxy or soft.

•       The scent should be gentle and herbal. A strong perfume smell means something has been added.

How to use it

Like all traditional soap from this region, Aleppo soap is a bar for everything. Use it on your face, your body and your hair. Some people use it as a shaving soap too. Keep it on a draining soap dish between uses and it will last a long time. As with any new soap, try it on a small patch of skin first.

Try our Aleppo soap with 40% laurel oil, handmade in Antakya.