Description of the site: The factory is one of five still operating with a simple production capacity. The person in charge of the factory says the family inherited this craft hundreds of years ago. The last of them was his father, the late Muath al-Nabulsi, who used to work as the head of the Nablus Chamber of Commerce, so the factory administration was transferred to one of his sons.The architectural design of the factory conforms to the prevailing style of factories in the Ottoman period, and the building consists of two floors, and in some, it has three floors, where the third floor was a home for the owner of the soap factory.The factory was built of local limestone and was roofed in the form of intersecting arches carried on thick stone bases. It is divided into: the ground floor, which includes the owner's office, the cooking pots, and several oil wells dug under the floor, with a total capacity of about fifty tons of oil.The cooking pot is made of copper, weighing up to one ton. It is covered with stone and fireclay bricks. Next to the pot, there is a small water tank, and below it is the combustion oven. The ground floor also includes stores for raw materials, such as caustic soda and dried olives for combustion, where the cooking process took a week to complete.The second floor: It is called (Al-Mufrad), as it was designated to pour the sticky soap after it was finished cooking, cooling, cutting, and stamping with the soap's trademark, drying it, and then wrapping and packing it in preparation for export. The soap factory owner still keeps all the tools used in the different stages of production. It is worth mentioning that each soap factory had more than fifteen people under the management of the soap owner, and thus this soap was the most significant portion of the workforce in the city.The number of soap factories in Nablus reached approximately forty. However, they were damaged by the earthquake that struck the city in 1927 AD. And it began to gradually decline due to the high prices of olive oil, and the introduction of modern products such as liquid and aromatic soaps, leaving only a few of these factories operating with a modest production capacity. Moreover, the occupation invasion of Nablus in 2002 AD also destroyed, several of these factories.
It is located on Al-Nasr Street inside the Old City, specifically opposite Al-Nasr Mosque and Al-Aqsa Sweets. It is bordered on the north by Al-Nasr Street, on the east and west by commercial shops, and on the south by residential houses.
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PS-NBS
Palestinian Territories