Afghanistan · Glasswork / Glassblowing
Sheesha-gari (Glass Craft)
The hand-blowing of distinctive colored glassware — historically renowned goblets, vases, and decorative vessels in characteristic deep blue and green — in Herat, western Afghanistan's historic Silk Road trading hub and 15th-century Timurid capital. This record introduces glassblowing as an entirely new craft family to the Afghanistan archive, whose existing 12 records span weaving, embroidery, leatherwork, stone carving, metalwork, wood carving, felt, and ceramics, but document no glass craft of any kind. The tradition faces a severe, well-documented and named-practitioner-confirmed survival crisis: contemporary press coverage profiles Ghulam Sakhi, described as one of the last makers of Herati glassware, working in a brick-and-corrugated-iron workshop that operates only a few days each month due to insufficient demand, undercut by cheaper Chinese-made glass imports that most Afghan buyers now prefer despite their comparative fragility and lack of the distinctive character of genuine hand-blown Herati color glass. Sakhi began working alongside his own glassblower father at age seven, representing a direct, still-living link to a craft tradition now explicitly described in press documentation as 'at risk of dying out.'
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not Listed
The making of the rabab, a short-necked, waisted lute carved from a single block of mulberry wood and considered central to Afghan musical identity, in the workshops around Kharabat Street and Shor-Bazaar in Kabul, the quarter where…
The making of jali — latticed wooden screens built from an ornamental geometric pattern — historically used throughout traditional Kabul domestic and public architecture, with surviving examples concentrated in the Murad Khani and…
Nastaliq is a style of Islamic calligraphy formalized in the 14th century, traditionally credited to the master calligrapher Mir 'Ali Tabrizi, combining elements of two earlier styles, Naskh and Ta'liq ('hanging') — the latter naming the…
Ornate wood carving is documented as one of Afghanistan's oldest crafts, decorating private houses, mosques, and furniture for millennia.
Istalif (استالف) is a town 35km north of Kabul that has been Afghanistan's primary pottery center for centuries — producing the characteristic turquoise-blue and green glazed earthenware that is the most widely recognized Afghan domestic…
Maidani (میدانی) is the silk embroidery tradition of the Hazara people of central Afghanistan — one of Afghanistan's most distinct ethnic groups, whose craft traditions have been particularly targeted in the current conflict.
The mouth-blown glass Christmas ornament tradition of Lauscha — a village on the Thuringia-Bavaria border that is the origination point of the modern glass Christmas ornament (Weihnachtskugel), first produced around 1847 and subsequently…
The glass-blowing tradition of the Bavarian Forest (Bayerischer Wald) — the oldest glass-making region in Germany, with glassworks documented in the forest since the 13th century, taking advantage of the abundant wood fuel and silica-rich…
The hand-blowing of glass in the Catalan tradition — centered on La Bisbal d'Empordà (historically the primary Catalan glass production center) and revived in contemporary studio glass workshops in Barcelona and the Empordà.
Leaded stained-glass windows for buildings, which in Montevideo flourished in a documented boom of 1920–1940, when a prosperous city favored interior courtyards crowned with glass.
The Leerdam studio glass tradition — the making of unique handblown art glass objects (Unica) at the Royal Leerdam Glassworks in South Holland, where the Dutch glass artist A.D.
The crushing, molding, and kiln-firing of recycled glass into vividly patterned powder-glass beads by Krobo artisans, predominantly women, of Odumase-Krobo, Agomanya, and Somanya in Ghana's Eastern Region.