- Title: AFGHANISTAN: GLASS MAKING CURIOSITY SHOP
- Date: 15th April 2004
- Summary: (L!3) HERAT, AFGHANISTAN (RECENT) (REUTERS) DISPLAY OF GLASS DISHES AND GLASSES IN SHOP (2 SHOTS) GLASS MAKER HAJI SULTAN HAMEEDI LOOKING AT HIS GLASSES (4 SHOTS) (SOUNDBITE) (Dari) GLASS MAKER HAJI SULTAN HAMEEDI SAYING: "I took up this art 45 years ago in this shop, and I want to preserve this national art because it has 3000 years of history and I want to be able to co
- Embargoed: 30th April 2004 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: HERAT, AFGHANISTAN
- Country: Afghanistan
- Topics: Business,Industry
- Reuters ID: LVA5CZDG9C0RYVP6LB8OIZVSNOHC
- Story Text: Afghan curiosity shop continues glass-making craft.
The shop sits near one of Afghanistan's historic mosques. Outside, a sign in English that leaves most visitors smiling - "General store and glass factory, north of the great mosque, silver silky carpet and other carpet, rug, blue glasses, gun, pistol, silver, copper, wooder brans, maudy music and old things."
Welcome to Haji Sultan Hameedi's dusty old curiosity shop - a place which is as exotic and mysterious as its wares from all corners of Afghanistan and beyond.
Inside, visitors must trip their way though piles of musty Afghan and Persian rugs, tribal costumes, head-dresses, nomadic saddle bags and strands of hanging beads. They can sit and take tea and talk through the merits of "wooder brans" and "maudy music", sign writer's peccadilloes that baffle even Mr Hameedi.
In any case, he explains, the jumble of old and not so old artefacts from near and far is really only a sideline.
Hameedi's speciality is glass -- hand blown and fashioned at a workshop just a few doors down the street.
He says his family business in this ancient western city is one of the few remaining in Afghanistan practising a craft dating back thousands of years.
"I took up this art 45 years ago in this shop, and I want to preserve this national art because it has 3000 years of history and I want to be able to continue doing it," Hameedi said.
Herat glass is known by its imperfections - no two articles are alike and all are filled with air bubbles, like most ancient glass made before modern mass production.
He explains that he now uses recycled glass because the Chaqmaq sandstone used in the past is unavailable. Adding copper to the mix produces the blue glass for which Herat has long been famous; iron gives you green glass; and gold, a deep red, though present-day economics mean there is now little demand for that. Few doors down, Raz Mohammad, a relative of Hameedi, gets on to work in his tiny mud-floored workshop.
He blows into a tube to fashion goblets, carafes, vases and bowls from red-hot molten blobs plucked from the furnace.
He works with the speed and consummate skill of a craftsman: a tap here, a puff there, a twirl, and within seconds the shapeless blob has become a delicate goblet or vase. His eight-year old son, Sameen, squats nearby, stoking the fire. He hopes one day to take up his father's trade.
"I am happy working here. It may look hard for most people but once you learn it, it's actually very easy,"
Sameen said.
Hameedi is 58, but like many Afghans who lived through the country's past quarter-century of conflict, looks perhaps a decade older.
He is hoping that the peace process under way since the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001 will bring a revival of the booming tourism trade he remembers from the time of President Mohammad Daoud in the 1970s and King Zahir Shah before him.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Afghanistan and Herat were stopping points for hippies on the overland trail from Europe to Asia.
The Afghan leg of the hippie trail became history with the Soviet invasion a year after Daoud's assassination in 1978.
Hameedi's shop was shut down for 14 years and he himself spent time in jail.
Today there is a trickle of foreign visitors, including the odd aid worker or visiting journalist, but Hameedi has developed a market among the hundreds of foreigners now living in Kabul, where he has another shop, and in neighbouring Pakistan.
He says his factory produces between 100 and 120 glass pieces a day, only about 20 of which are sold locally.
"We hope that the tourists eventually come back to Afghanistan, because hopefully we will be able to earn 500 US dollars a day. It's the tourists who give value to this occupation, not the Afghans," he said. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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