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IC NEWSLETTER -
SUMMER 2010
8
Mahmoud Khalife sits in front of the furnace
open doors with ease. The blats of waves
of orange heat blasting in his face and eyes,
doesn’t seem to phase him. “I’m used to it,”
he said grinning. Deftly he inserts a thin long
tube around laden with a piece of molten
glass into the kiln, pulls it out, blows into the
tube forming a bubble at the end, swings the
tube in circles to elongate the molten glass
and inserts it back in. The blob of glass be-
gins to take shape. A small glass pitcher, then
a spout appears, the open neck and finally a
stamp of “IC” is gently placed on it.
He takes another blob of molten glass and
repeats the whole procedures again. One by
one the pitchers displaying the IC logo are in-
serted into another oven to dry. Many hours
later, they are ready to be collected.
For Mahmoud and his father, uncles, and cous-
ins gathered around, it’s just part of the job.
“I was a small child when I first started learn-
ing the trade,” said Ali Khalife, Mahmoud’s
uncle. “And my brothers and I have trained our
boys since the age of 12.”
It takes eight years to master the trade – a
trade the Khalife family is immensely proud of.
The Khalife’s family works in Sarafand, a small
coastal village just southofSidon–onceknown
as Sarepta, a Phoenician port where the art of
blowing down a thin hollow tube to shape
glass was invented more than 2,000 years ago.
Today the Khalife family business is the last
glass-blowing enterprise in Lebanon. Once a
thriving business, orders are few and far be-
tween.
“We used to have a lot of work and rarely
turned the oven off,” said Nisrine Khalifeh who
runs the family’s shop just a few meters in
front of the furnace. “But now we only turn it
on if it’s worth the cost.”
It takes 24 hours to heat up the home-made
kiln to the required 2,552 degrees Fahrenheit
(1,400 degrees centigrade) and this alone
generates huge costs. The family has to amass
several orders before firing it up and then
work 24 hours a day to complete the orders.
The family recycles glass donated by house-
holds or organizations. School children on
a field trip often stop by to see the family at
work.
The Khalife family depends on orders – like
IC’s request for souvenir pitchers – to keep its
business going. “It would be sad if Lebanon
lost its glass blowing business completely,” he
says.
IC pitchers are available at the Alumni Office.
The last of
the Glass Blowers