Tannour making in Hasakah: Heritage flourishes during crisis

HASAKAH — One sunny day this spring, 32-year-old Sanaa al-Ali and her cousin, 40-year-old Fida, focused deeply on the task before them: crafting a clay tannour—a traditional wood-fired oven used for baking bread. The two women’s mothers sat nearby, watching their agile hands and the speed of their work in the al-Nashwa neighborhood of Syria’s northeastern Hasakah city. 

Sanaa’s mother, 65-year-old Kahla al-Ahmad, stood and approached a finished tannour her daughter made the previous day. “They want a big one, make it to order,” she instructed. Fida’s mother, 70-year-old Subha Muhammad, interjected with a tone of admiration: “They’ve started to make them better than us, see?”

Within half an hour, Sanaa and Fida finished shaping the circular bases for three tannours, leaving them to dry under the sun before resuming work on the next layer. 

In Syria’s rural northeast, clay tannours are used to bake bread at home, which residents rely on alongside mass-produced loaves from bread ovens. One bundle of bread from a bakery can cost more than 7,000 Syrian pounds ($0.46 at the black market exchange rate of SYP 15,200 to the dollar). Tannour bread becomes an essential alternative when bread ovens stop operating or cannot produce enough: crises often repeated in a country at war for more than 13 years. 

The tannour is more than a useful tool in times of crisis, however. Many Syrians choose to bake in one for the taste it gives bread, and because it is part of their heritage and memories, as in the case of 49-year-old Zakaria Suleiman Ahmad in the village of al-Karbawi, southwest of Hasakah’s Qamishli city. 

Ahmad bought a tannour in February for SYP 160,000 ($10) from a craftsman in his village. He loves homemade bread, “with a delicious smell and a taste that surpasses bread from automatic ovens,” he told Syria Direct. 

Workers at a bakery in Hasakah city make bread using a wood-fired tannour oven, 27/4/2024 (Salam Ali/Syria Direct)

While there is a bakery in his village, “the tannour is essential for many families,” Ahmad said. Al-Karbawi residents usually buy the clay ovens from a young man in the village, who makes them by hand after learning the trade from his mother who died four years ago. 

Beyond bread, tannours are used to cook dishes such as mandi, a traditional Arab dish of meat and rice, as well as fatayer (hand pies) and other baked goods. 

Kahla, who has spent decades making tannours herself, prefers bread baked in one to that produced by a machine. Her neighbor agrees, and has a tannour in her garden that Kahla made and gifted to her five years ago. 

“Tannour bread is better if it’s hot, so I make 10 loaves at a time—enough for one day,” the neighbor, who preferred not to be named, said. She uses her tannour when mass-produced bread is not available, and sometimes “when I crave it,” she told Syria Direct. 

Kahla’s neighbor intends to buy a new tannour soon, because “the dough no longer sticks well to its walls,” she said. When baking in a tannour, shaped loaves are pressed to the sides of the heated oven by hand or using a pillow-like cushion, where they adhere and cook with the heat from a fire at its base. 

Kahla interjected, noting “the average lifespan of a tannour is five years, or a little more. It depends on how well you keep it and avoid exposing it to water.”

Making a tannour

Sculpting a tannour requires a specific type of earth, which women bring from the sites of wells dug by Hasakah residents or pay to have trucked in from the countryside. “One shipment is enough for 20 or 25 tannours,” Sanaa said. 

The method begins with preparing the clay, Kahla explained. A quantity of earth is placed on a plastic lid and sprinkled with water until it is all wet. Then, hay, goat hair, salt and burlap fibers are mixed in until the clay holds together well. The mixture is then left to sit for a day or two before it is ready to use. 

Kahla and Subha, well-seasoned tannour makers, stressed the need for the mixture to be “fermented” for a period before use. However, their daughters Sanaa and Fida sometimes have to “make a tannour the same day the mixture is prepared, if it is a rush order,” Kahla said. 

Once the “dough” is ready, the first ring of the tannour is formed, and the oven is built up, ring by ring, to reach the “mouth of the tannour,” Sanaa explained. Each ring must dry in the sun before work can continue. Three or four rings can be completed per day, for a total of up to nine. Made to order for each customer, tannours vary in size, with the largest reaching around 120 centimeters tall. 

When a tannour is finished and delivered, the oven is installed resting on an angle on the ground to make it easier to stick loaves to its internal walls. An opening at its base releases smoke from the fire lit within during use. 

“The stage of preparing the dough [clay] is the most difficult,” Sanaa and Fida agreed. They mix the ingredients with their feet for around half an hour, until it holds together and is ready. The process is physically demanding, so they work together taking turns. Then, each forms the layers of a tannour individually. 

Fida al-Ali, 40, crafts the first ring of a tannour near her home in Hasakah city’s eastern al-Nashwa neighborhood, 27/4/2024 (Salam Ali/Syria Direct)

Heritage becomes a trade

“In our village, we didn’t make tannours for commercial purposes. We made them for our relatives and acquaintances,” Kahla, who learned the craft at 20 years old in a village in the Jabal Abdulaziz area of southwestern Hasakah, said. 

After Kahla married, she moved with her husband to al-Dakakin street in Hasakah city, where she began to make and sell tannours. “Here, I sold the first tannour for SYP 250 [around $5 at the time]. That was around 30 years ago,” she said.

Over time, the price of the tannours Kahla’s family made gradually increased: to SYP 1,000, then SYP 3,000. Just before the Syrian revolution broke out in the spring of 2011, they sold for SYP 10,000 (nearly $200 at the time). During the war, a tannour’s price increased to SYP 30,000, and currently sells for around SYP 75,000—the equivalent of around $5, the same as when she began selling them. 

Subha, Fida’s mother, learned to make a tannour when she was 25 years old. Like Kahla, for years she made them to give to neighbors and acquaintances free of cost. “After I married and had children, I needed a source of income, so I started to sell tannours,” she said. 

Both Kahla and Subha agreed that demand for tannours rose during the war, with people resorting to buying the ovens and making bread at home during shortages at bakeries. Repeated bread crises in several parts of Syria have been one hallmark of the country’s war. 

Sometimes, “we would make four or five tannours at a time, and the customers would pay in advance to get the tannour as soon as possible,” Kahla recalled. 

Today, demand for tannours generally increases in good harvest seasons, as Hasakah residents set aside a quantity of the wheat they grow to grind and use for tannour bread, Subha said. But it is not like the first years of the war, “when we were selling an average of two tannours a day.”

‘The new generation’

Kahla, Subha, and their relative Tarfa al-Abd have been making tannours for the past four decades on al-Dakakin street. It is a way to make a living, but also to preserve “this folk heritage,” they said. All are keen to pass the craft down to their daughters and daughters-in-law.

In their old age, the three ladies are proud of mastering tannour making and creating large ovens, to the point they became well-known in northeastern Syria and beyond. “Many years ago, I sold four tannours to a resident of Aleppo,” Kahla said. Sobha interrupted, boasting, “when I was a young woman, I made one so big we couldn’t get it out the garden gate.” 

Still, they do not deny that those they taught the profession to now make tannours that, at times, surpass the quality of their own. “Now, sometimes I am not pleased with my mother’s work,” Sanaa, who learned to make tannours from Kahla 10 years ago, remarked. “They say we’ve taken their place in the trade,” Fida added with a laugh. “We reply that we are preserving your craft and keeping it alive.”

“We are the new generation. If we don’t create, this trade could disappear,” Fida added, raising her voice so her mother and aunt could hear where they sat a few meters away. Kahla stopped making tannours two years ago, while her relatives Subha and Tarfa stopped well before that, no longer physically able to continue the work. 

“It is hard and painstaking work, and requires physical effort,” Subha said, her face and hands wrinkled by time. 

Sanaa, Fida and Nada—the wife of Tarfa’s son—prefer making and selling tannours to farm work, which is more difficult for them and requires longer work hours. Making one tannour takes two or three days’ work if the weather is sunny, with an average of one or two hours of active labor a day. If the weather is not right, it can take around a week, Fida said. 

“Making tannours was my mother’s livelihood for decades, and now it is mine, Sanaa said. Last year, she made more than 25 tannours. This year, starting in March when the weather was right, she made nine in the course of two months.

Fida made 21 tannours last year and seven in March. When the harvest begins, “we make several tannours together at the same time,” she added.

Sanaa, Fida and Nada lamented that they cannot produce tannours in the winter. Because they are not able to construct a room dedicated to the craft, they have to stop production when the weather turns, only working under the summer sun. 

Tannour makers Syria Direct spoke to also noted the price of earth and hay was high this year. The cost of a single soil shipment currently costs up to SYP 150,000 ($10), while the same quantity cost SYP 80,000 ($5.50) in 2023. 

High transportation costs also impact business with people living in distant villages, Fida said, because buying a tannour from them requires transportation from Hasakah city. 

In the long term, the challenges facing the craft of tannour making are less tangible. Fida worries about her relatives not wanting to learn the trade. “I want to teach others, but nobody accepts it because it is not an easy profession,” she said.

For now, the work continues. When Syria Direct spoke to Fida, she was preparing an order of six tannours for customers in the Hasakah countryside. Eager to deliver them in one batch, “I made two at once in the same day,” she said. 

This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.