Antioch, City of Soap: The Story Behind Dr Ancient

Ask someone in Antakya about soap and you'll probably get a story about a grandmother, a bathhouse, or a neighbour who made it in the back courtyard every autumn after the olive harvest. Soap here isn't something you pick up without thinking. It's part of how the city has lived for a very long time, and the city has lived for a very long time indeed.

A city with Alexander in its bones

Antakya is the modern name for Antioch. It was founded around 300 BC by Seleucus I, one of Alexander the Great's generals, on the banks of the Orontes river, which locals still call the Asi. There's an old story, told by the ancient writer Libanius, that Alexander himself camped here, drank from a spring and wanted to build a city on the spot, but ran out of time and left a shrine to Zeus instead. Nobody can prove it. People in Antakya tell it anyway.

Alexander's name is still all over the region. Just up the coast is İskenderun, which the Greeks called Alexandretta. It is said to have been founded by Alexander after his victory at the nearby Battle of Issus in 333 BC. İskender is simply the Turkish form of Alexander.

One of the great cities of the ancient world

Under Roman rule, Antioch grew into the third largest city of the empire, after only Rome and Alexandria. At its height it may have been home to around half a million people. It sat on the trade routes that ran between the Mediterranean and the lands to the east, so silk, spices, wine and olive oil all passed through its markets.

It was a city of new ideas as well as goods. According to the Book of Acts, it was in Antioch that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians.

You can still see how people lived here. The Hatay Archaeology Museum in Antakya holds one of the finest collections of Roman mosaics in the world: gods, dancers, feasts and hunting scenes that once covered the floors of Antioch's villas and baths.

Daphne and the laurel

A few miles south of the old city is Harbiye, known in ancient times as Daphne. It was famous for its waterfalls, its springs and its thick groves of laurel and cypress. The Greeks said this was where the nymph Daphne, running from the god Apollo, was turned into a laurel tree, and visitors were even shown the tree itself. Seleucus built a great temple to Apollo there, and wealthy Antiochenes came out to Daphne to bathe, walk and escape the summer heat.

Laurel still grows in those hills, and Hatay is known across Turkey for its laurel soap to this day. It's a nice thought that the same trees in an old myth still end up in a bar of soap.

Antioch and Aleppo

Aleppo lies about 100 km to the east, and for most of its history Antioch looked towards it. Under the Ottomans, Antioch was a district of the province of Aleppo, and in the 1920s it was briefly attached to the State of Aleppo before joining Turkey in 1939. The two cities shared olive groves, laurel trees, trade and, not surprisingly, a way of making soap. The famous Aleppo soap, made with olive oil and laurel oil, is part of the same tradition we still work in today.

Olive oil, water, fire and time

Soap in this part of the world has always been made in much the same way. Olive oil is cooked slowly in big open kettles until it turns into soap. For centuries the soapmakers of the Levant got the alkali they needed from the ash of saltwort plants that grew along the coast and in the desert. Even the word alkali comes from the Arabic al-qalī, meaning the ashes. Today the ingredients are cleaner and more consistent than they used to be, but the method has hardly changed.

Where we come in

We didn't set out to improve on any of that. We set out to keep it. Every Dr Ancient bar is still made by hand in Antakya, cooked slowly in the traditional way and cut by hand once it has set. It takes longer than factory soap, and the bars come out a little different from one another. We've come to like that.

In the old bathhouses, nobody had a separate face wash, body wash and shampoo. There was soap, and it was used from head to toe. Ours works the same way. A lot of our customers have quietly cleared three or four bottles off the side of the bath and kept one bar instead.

Soap has been part of everyday life in Antioch for centuries. We think that's worth holding on to.

Have a look through the collection and find the bar that suits you.