QADIYA is an independent, noncommercial community project: an archive of Palestine’s history, built for the cause and open to everyone.
This is an early pilot. Its records were gathered with AI help from cited sources and are still being checked, so don’t rely on them yet, and tell us if something is wrong.
We’re looking for people and organisations to build it with us: historians, archivists, translators, designers, developers, and partners who can support the work.
Glass blown by hand in Hebron, a craft of its old town since at least the Roman period that flourished under Islamic, medieval and Ottoman rule. Families passed the knowledge from one generation to the next; in the mid-nineteenth century the Sharia court records list seven workshops, three of them in Haret al-Qazazeen, the glassmakers’ quarter, which was governed by its own craft rules under a sheikh. The furnaces, of heat-resistant baked clay, melted local feldspar and soda ash; the workshops made pitchers, cups, lanterns, bracelets and rings, sold in Jerusalem, Nablus and Cairo and through Jaffa to Europe. Hebron showed its glass at the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873; it is made today mostly for decoration.