Where Our Soap Comes From: The Old Soapmakers of Antioch

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 a product you pick up without thinking. It's part of how the city has lived for a very long time.

Antakya is the modern name for Antioch, once one of the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean. It sat where trade routes met, in a valley full of olive trees. Olive oil went into the food, into the lamps and, sooner or later, into the soap pot. Over centuries, the families and workshops of the region turned plain olive oil soap into a craft of its own.

The recipe hasn't needed much changing

The old method is simple to describe and hard to do well. Olive oil, water and lye are cooked slowly in an open kettle until they become soap. Nothing is added to make it smell like flowers or look like candy. What you end up with is a dense, pale bar that does its job and lasts.

We didn't set out to improve on that. We set out to keep it. Every Dr Ancient bar is still made by hand in Antakya, cooked 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.

One bar for everything

In the old hammams, 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.

Why we think it still matters

Most of what's in a modern shower gel didn't exist a hundred years ago. The soap from Antioch did. It was made from things people could grow, press and cook, and that's still what goes into ours. We think there's something to be said for a bathroom routine you can actually explain.

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