Hagaza

The workshop

Hagaza is a small village in Qena governorate that has become a centre for fine wooden craft, worked with basic tools and bare hands.

The training runs as a three-year apprenticeship: a group of young men joins each year and learns to carve, finish and eventually design. The wood is sarso, and the finish is food-safe oil on anything used at the table.

Accounts of the start differ — some say a French priest taught the first carvers in the 1990s, others place it in the mid-1980s. Worth settling with the workshop before it goes in print.