He's known as “Uncle” Hasan, the last standing traditional construction craftsman in Jeddah.
This 78-year-old craftsman has played a key role in about 60 percent of the recent restorations that have taken place in the city’s historic center. A living graduate of the ancient school of construction, Hasan Mohammad Al-Essa has used the curriculum of practical hands-on training that has been taught from master to apprentice through the centuries.
As anyone who has been to Jeddah’s historic center can attest, the buildings are distinctively “Old Arabia”, with adobe-covered buildings raised from limestone or carved bricks of sea coral. The distinctive window scrims are fashioned from hard wood imported from East Africa.
In recent years there has been an effort by municipal authorities to revitalize the historic center. Scaffolding can be seen here and there caging in crumbling masterpieces of chipped turquoise paint and broken stained glass, the old downtown homes of merchant families that have abandoned, with a few exceptions, for newer ritzier parts of the city. Many buildings seem beyond repair, leaning like old haggard men — fatal collapses waiting to happen.
At the Baishin House in Balad, the city’s downtown area, which is used by the Jeddah Municipality as a branch office, Uncle Hasan shared his memories with Arab News and spoke about life back in the old days of Jeddah. He began learning his craft “somewhere in the 1940s,” he says.
“Back in those days, work was very much organized,” he said. Each profession was under the supervision of a guild headed by a local sheikh. “No one could move from one profession to an other unless he got an approval letter from the sheikh,” he said. This procedure preserved public rights and insured work flow for all.
Al-Essa says his father took him to Khalil Al-Ulaimi, who was Jeddah’s construction sheikh, a master craftsman, for training and work. “Back then, most parents used to send their kids to learn a profession under a sheikh,” said Al-Essa. “It was the only way to get a job — in order to get a life.”
A father of 10 children, all college graduates, Uncle Hasan started his career as a laborer, carrying limestone and coral bricks, buckets of mud for the adobe, and Somali tropical hard wood.
“My daily wage was 75 halalas — quite enough to cater the daily need of food and basic household requirements,” he said.
After a few years of hard work Al-Essa gained enough construction know-how to receive a recommendation letter from the Sheikh Al-Ulaimi testifying that he had graduated to Muallim, a craftsman. This letter, a kind of diploma and license, allowed Al-Essa to work as a certified craftsman, or to start his own construction business. He began as a certified builder by constructing homes.
Al-Essa said that a normal one-floor house usually took three to five months to complete at a cost of SR300. “The first thing we construct in every house is the washing room, which is used for washing the dead house members,” said Al-Essa. “It was an essential part in every home in Jeddah.”
Al-Essa described an old Jeddah that seems distant from today’s sprawling city of three million.
“It was inhabited by around 20,000 people who mostly knew each other,” he said.
A primitive a water desalination device that they called the kindasa produced drinking water for Jeddah.
“We used to go outside the limits of Jeddah to bring water from Al-Waziriah water spring, because the kindasa did not produce enough water for the city,” he said.
The old man says that today’s Jeddah is completely different, and foreign.
“People don’t know each other any more, and life has become more complicated,” he said.
Despite its rich and long history, there is no world heritage site in Saudi Arabia, according to the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) website. Getting UNESCO’s World Heritage Site certification opens the way for collaborative efforts to consult and preserve parts of the world, from old cities to coral reefs, considered part of the world’s heritage.
According to Sami Nawar, head of the Tourism and Culture department of the Jeddah Municipality, the Kingdom has recently applied to register Al-Diriyah in Riyadh and Jeddah’s historic center as heritage sites under UNESCO. He said that it is a long procedure that might take a year, because it requires a lot of research paper, UNESCO committee visits and consultancy work. “This is only the first step. The country is working to register all its historic sites within the few coming years,” Nawar assured.
Until then, it’s up to city officials and men like Uncle Hasan to work to preserve the remaining vestiges of “Old Arabia” in the Kingdom. For his part, Al-Essa says he has enjoyed applying his craft by working with the municipality to preserve the old city.
“It keeps me linked to the past and gives me the power to work hard in keeping the spirit of the old days alive,” he said.
“Uncle Hasan is a great asset to the department,” said Nawar, who adds that the old craftsman has played an important role in identifying many of the structures that should be renovated and preserved.
While younger men do the heavy lifting, Nawar says that Uncle Hasan’s intimate knowledge of how these structures were originally built has been vital to the preservation process.
“He has helped us in preserving around 200 structures out of the existing 500,” he said.
The department is currently working on a project to record all the historical and construction knowledge of Uncle Hasan in order to use it as a reference once time catches up to one of Jeddah’s last living old world master builders.