Note: Re-edit of “Last potter in Beit Chabab? In this town of traditional pottery? Who is Fawzi Fakhoury? June 22, 2013″
BEIT CHABAB, Lebanon:
Fawzi Fakhoury’s hands are calloused and brown. Hours of shaping tough clay and standing in front of a burning wood oven have stained them shades darker than the rest of his body and toughened them so they are like leather.
Fakhoury stand of potter. There were at least 6 families making a living from that art 3 decades ago, and their products were exported to the adjacent States of Jordan, Syria, Palestine and even Iraq.
Fawzi is rather short for a western standard, with salt and pepper hair and bushy eyebrows, and dressed in simple, mud-stained clothes.
His weathered hands stand testimony to the thousands of pots he has created for the better part of his life. He inherited that job from his father and the entire family helped in the family “factory”, until one of the members decided to resume the work.
Actually, it seems that Fawzi is the last working potter in Beit Chabab and pretty soon will retire: No vaible trade to export to.
I have posted many articles on Lebanon, and Michelle Ghoussoub has this latest.
Michelle Ghoussoub published in The Daily Star, this June 20, 2013: “Meet the last potter in Beit Shabab”
Fakhoury, left, works with his brother Assad, who helps out occasionallyin the shop. (The Daily Star/Mohammad Azakir)
The scenic village is nestled in Lebanon’s mountains just 17 km outside of east Beirut.
Sixty years ago, dozens of Beit Shabab families produced traditional pottery, and the heat from 40 burning ovens could be felt on the streets during the summer, Fawzi explains.
The town’s name was synonymous with pottery, and people came from around the country to purchase the artisanal clay pots, used for storing everything from arak to grains, olive oil and wine.
Now, he is the only one left.
Fakhoury’s workshop resembles a hermit’s cave.
Though dark and dusty, it remains well used and loved.
Perched precariously on the edge of a small but steep ravine, Fakhoury’s working space has a crumbling old stone facade nestled into the mountain itself.
An elegant stone archway frames the entrance, with rusted scrap metal and broken pieces of mortar piled on top to prevent rainwater from flooding the small room. Bits and pieces of fragmented pots are piled haphazardly in a back corner.
A traditional stove, or babour, for kerosene burner, commands the center of the room. It doubles as the only heat source during the winter months, as nighttime temperatures can occasionally drop below freezing.
An old television set crackles in the background, the colors and shapes on the screen disfigured by poor reception. A fine, white film of dust covers every surface, and it puffs out of antique pillows on the faded couch when it is sat upon.
No one knows or remembers exactly how long the workshop has been running.
Fakhoury believes the family folklore. He says that Roman potters trained his forefathers when they came to construct the ancient, colonnaded citadel of Baalbek in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley around 300 B.C. (Baalbak is as ancient as 7,000 years, before Rome or Athens existed)
When the Romans left, his ancestors searched for the purest clay in the country, and eventually settled in Beit Shabab to be close to the best natural source: a small and muddy lake in the forest beneath the village (the mawsel).
Fakhoury’s creased wrinkles deepen and his brown face cracks into a crooked smile as he recalls a childhood of running among the clay pots.
He’s worked as a potter for 60 years. His father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather all worked in this same space before him.
At no moment in his life did Fakhoury, now 66, wish for an alternative career path. He loves this job, he says.
Years of hard labor have given him a worn appearance and demeanor, but they have also kept him strong and tough.
Toiling in the workshop where he was raised, he cuts the figure of a surviving Chinese terracotta warrior, stained by the mud that has defined his livelihood for half a century.
Fakhoury left the village temporarily during the Lebanese Civil War and worked in trade in West Africa. He always dreamt of returning to his workshop to continue his family’s legacy.
“I lived there, but I dreamed in Lebanon,” he says with a smile.
Fakhoury returned to find a wall of the workshop blown out by a bomb, but his tools intact. He wasted no time in repairing the room and reopening his business.
His wife and he have three daughters, all of whom are married and have long since left the house.
Women don’t do pottery, he says, at least in Beit Shabab.
His face falls, however, when he reveals that he has no heir to continue Beit Shabab’s trademark industry when he retires.
“This workshop has been running for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, and when I go, it may all have been for nothing,” he lamented, looking wistfully around the chamber.
Though customers used to flock from across the country to hand pick his pots, the advent of plastic containers has slashed demand massively.
Nowadays, customers are often decorators seeking a rustic look, or tourists looking for authentic Lebanese craftsmanship.
He still ships a couple of hundred pots every year to a Jordanian arak producer, who uses them to store the anis-flavored liquor., like Ouzou in Greece
Producing pottery is like cultivating a crop, he muses. The clay is collected in the spring when it has the right consistency, then handspun into pots using a potter’s wheel.
The kiln, an oven designed especially for pottery, is fired up in August, the hottest month of the year, to accelerate the baking.
During these scorching weeks, Fakhoury stays up throughout the night to monitor the ovens and rotate the pots, making sure that months of intensive craftsmanship and exertion do not go up in flames.
The work is hard, and the fruit of his arduous labor much less plentiful than it once was.
While his father would light the oven 8 times in one summer, he now only produces one batch of pots a year.
A pottery festival and exhibition in Normandy, France, once invited Fakhoury to learn different pottery techniques.
He says it was an honor to be recognized, but that he found himself underwhelmed by the developed industrial techniques of French potters. Having made thousands of pots in his life, he says he prefers to stick to what his father and grandfather taught him as a child.
Nassar Fakhoury, Fawzi’s neighbor and former landlord, says “Fawzi is a part of this village in the same way that these streets are. He’s always in his workshop and his family has always been there. The children call him ‘the pottery man.’ There’s just no other way to describe him,”
Nassar shares Fawzi surname but is not sure exactly how they are related. Family lineages and histories go so far back in the village that they are sometimes impossible to keep track of or untangle.
When asked what has changed about the business since he began over half a century ago, Fawzi’s answer is simple: “Nothing. I still do business the way my father and grandfather did.”
It’s a legacy that may end without an apprentice or heir devoted to following in his forefathers’ footsteps.
It is almost impossible to picture the village without its main attraction, and for now, Fawzi will continue to fill that role. He says he cannot imagine himself anywhere else.
“My grandfather and father died here, and one day, I will join them,” he says. “What I want is to die here.”
Note 1: In my childhood, I visited and was acquainted with three families of potters in the lower part of Beit-Chabab, like the Tannous family. The entire family members participated in the production, especially in summer time. Traditional pottery is vanishing quickly in Lebanon, and not even replaced by mass production facilities. There are a few potters in Rashaya Fokhar, and are closing shop for no family members are willing to replace the older ones.
Note 2: A couple years ago I assisted in one of these night vigil. It was supposed to be the night the fire in the kiln (oven) for the pots to be suffocated. Annish played the guitar and sang Lebanese songs. We were a dozen gathered around the oven and a few kept joining in. Fawzi would get up from his couch and check on the readiness of the pots and add a few more woods. Around 2 am Fawzi decided it was time to kill the fire. We joined in bringing to the entrance of the oven the special “bumblebees” to stuff in to kill the fire.
Note 3: A couple centuries ago, pottery was started in the upper quarters of Beit Chabab, but the clay was whitish. The potters in the lower part of Beit Chabab had the reddish and better clay to use, and they supplanted the upper families in that art and industry.
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