شهادةField Notes · Craft

The floor that fed us, swept away one tile at a time

A Levantine tavern's encaustic cement floor outlived three governments. The men who could pour it are nearly gone — and so is the recipe.

The hydraulic press sits in the back room of the tavern, a black iron thing the size of a small donkey. Abou Selim bought it secondhand in 1958 from a tile works in Saida that was already closing. Every tile under the arches here came out of that machine — green of the cedar, red of the pomegranate, the brass-yellow border that catches lamplight after the second bottle of arak is opened.

A recipe nobody wrote down

Encaustic tile is not fired. The color is mineral pigment pressed wet into a bed of marble dust and cement, then cured slow in the shade for twenty-eight days. Abou Selim measured the pigment with a coffee cup and his thumb. When I asked him for proportions he laughed and said the floor would tell me if I got it wrong — it would fade in a year instead of a century.

"We did not decorate the floor. The floor was the table before there were tables." لم نزيّن الأرض، الأرض كانت المائدة