Down a narrow alley off Khan el-Khalili, where the gold shops give way to copper-smiths and the air smells of jasmine and heat, there’s a low workshop with soot on the walls and fire in its belly. Inside, behind a curtain of old beads and smoke, a man named Hossam bends over a glowing furnace—his breath shaping what his hands have already begun.
He is a glassblower.
Not the kind you read about in museums, but the kind Cairo still makes space for: quiet, steady, weathered like the bricks around him.
The room is hot. Always. Even in winter, the furnace roars like a lion, and sweat drips from his brow before the first shape takes form. But Hossam doesn’t flinch. He’s been doing this since he was thirteen, taught by an uncle who passed the trade down like a prayer.
Each piece begins the same—molten glass pulled like honey from the heat. He turns the rod with a rhythm born of muscle memory and breathes life into it with a practiced exhale. A perfume bottle, a lamp cover, a tiny vase the color of desert dusk. The shapes come slowly, almost dreamlike, as if he is coaxing memory from flame.
His workshop is cluttered but alive. Shelves sag under finished pieces—green, blue, amber. A radio crackles with umm Kulthum, and a cat sleeps on a sack of old rags near the door. Children sometimes peek inside, wide-eyed. Tourists find their way in too, sometimes by accident. Most are surprised to find the glass isn’t imported, that it’s made right here, by a man in a soot-smudged galabeya with ash on his hands.
Hossam doesn’t speak much English, but he gestures with warmth. He lets them watch. Sometimes, if they linger, he’ll make a small ornament—blown in front of their eyes, cooling slowly on a slab of stone. He sells what he makes for modest prices, but it’s never about the money.
“It’s not just glass,” he says in Arabic. “It’s air, and fire, and time. You need patience. You need to listen.”
His hands move as he speaks—sculpting, sealing, spinning light into solid.
He remembers when there were ten glassblowers on this street. Now, there are only two. Machines make it faster, cleaner, cheaper. But they don’t make it breathe.
At sunset, he steps out of the shop, wipes his hands on a cloth that has seen better days, and sips mint tea from a small glass—one he made himself, long ago. The furnace still glows behind him. Inside, a new vase slowly cools.
Hossam is not famous. His work isn’t signed. But it lives on mantelpieces in Istanbul, in Berlin, in Jakarta. Unlabeled beauty that began with Cairo fire and the breath of a man who never stopped listening to the flame.