Palestinian Olive Wood Carving: Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, and the Franciscan Workshops

Olive wood has been carved in Bethlehem and the two towns beside it for so long that the standard account of the craft opens in the fourth century, with the building of the Church of the Nativity. In Arabic the material is khashab al-zaytoun (خشب الزيتون), the wood of the olive, and it arrives at the workshop as a byproduct of the harvest rather than out of a quarry, a loom or a kiln.

Palestinian olive wood carving takes its raw material from branches pruned once the olive picking season ends. No tree is felled for a rosary or a nativity set. The workshops of Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala carve what the grove sheds, which makes this the rare Palestinian craft whose supply is set by an agricultural calendar, in the same way the motifs stitched across Palestinian heritage clothing were set by the districts that made them.

TL;DR

Palestinian olive wood carving is concentrated in three neighbouring towns: Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. The standard account traces the craft to the fourth century under Byzantine rule, when Greek Orthodox monks are said to have taught residents to carve, but it became an industry in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Italian and Franciscan artisans arriving on pilgrimage taught the technique and the Franciscan brotherhood opened teaching centres. The wood is branch wood from pruning, stored up to a year to dry before it is worked. A professional carver trains for six to seven years, and one piece can take up to forty five days to finish. Beit Sahour alone held 135 registered workshops in 2014, in a town of roughly 15,000 people. The weakness built into the craft is that it was built for pilgrims: tourism supplies about 70 percent of Bethlehem's annual income, and when visitors stop arriving the workshops empty within weeks.

What Is Palestinian Olive Wood Carving?

Palestinian olive wood carving is the working of olive branch wood into finished objects, almost all of them small enough for a pilgrim to carry home. The standard repertoire is narrow and has barely changed: crosses, boxes, picture frames, covers for old books, candle holders, rosaries, urns, vases, Christmas ornaments, and scenes of the Holy Family.

The material is the reason the craft exists in this form. Olive grows slowly and irregularly, so the grain runs in tight, contradictory directions and the wood takes a fine edge and a deep polish. It is also hard, which rules out fast work and rewards the kind of patience that only a long apprenticeship produces.

The narrowness of the repertoire is worth stating plainly, because it is usually described as tradition when it is closer to a market. Bethlehem carvers make what pilgrims buy. That is not a criticism of the craft; it is the fact that explains both its survival for four centuries and its fragility now.

The Franciscan Schools and the Bethlehem Souvenir Trade

Two crafts grew in Bethlehem together, and they share a history. Mother-of-pearl carving is said to have reached the city with Franciscan friars from Italy in the fifteenth century. Olive wood carving, by the standard account, developed into a full industry across Bethlehem and its neighbouring towns during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Italian and Franciscan artisans on pilgrimage taught local residents the technique.

What the Franciscans added was not the idea of carving but the school. The brotherhood set up centres for teaching intaglio and shell work and encouraged workshops to open around them, which turned a devotional skill into a trade with apprentices, families and export routes.

The dates that follow show how quickly it became an economy. Bethlehem women were employed in the mother-of-pearl industry by at least the seventeenth century, and the English traveller Richard Pococke recorded the craft when he passed through in 1727. The first showing of Palestinian mother-of-pearl work in the west came at the New York World's Fair in the early 1850s, where two brothers, Giries and Ibrahim Mansur, exhibited their pieces to considerable success.

The olive wood workshops sit inside that same lineage. They are the wood half of a souvenir industry the Franciscans organised, and the families running them today are frequently the fourth or fifth generation to hold the tools.

Where the Wood Comes From

The wood is pruning waste, and the timing of the craft follows from that. Branches are taken off at the completion of the olive picking season, which puts the supply of new material on the same calendar as the olive harvest itself.

Where the branches come from has changed. Carvers once worked wood from the groves immediately around them; they now buy most of it from the Jenin and Nablus areas in the northern West Bank, with Tulkarm also supplying the trade, because local groves have been lost and because the wood moves as a commodity by the tonne.

Price has moved with scarcity and with the difficulty of transport across the West Bank. Carvers told Al Jazeera in 2014 that a tonne of olive wood had risen from about 150 US dollars to 600 or even 700 dollars for good quality material. For a workshop of three or four people, that is the difference between a viable month and a lost one.

Drying comes next, and it cannot be rushed. Fresh olive wood is stored at the factories for up to a year before anyone cuts into it. After carving, pieces are set above a wood-burning fire and then laid out in the sun for twenty four hours to finish drying. Wood that skips this stage cracks later, in a buyer's house, on another continent.

How Long Does It Take to Carve a Piece of Olive Wood?

Sunbula, the Jerusalem fair-trade craft organisation, describes a six stage process and up to forty five days for a single piece, and six to seven years of training before a carver is considered professional. Those two figures explain more about the craft than any description of it.

The process runs in stages. Drilling machines rough out the outline, which accounts for roughly fifteen percent of the work and none of the skill. Everything after that is hand chiselling, then sanding, then polishing, then a coat of olive wax that brings the grain up and seals the surface.

The machine share is small and it is the part most often misread. A finished nativity figure is not a machined object with a hand-finished face; it is a hand-carved object that was rough-cut by a drill to save a carver a day of removing waste wood.

Beit Sahour, Beit Jala, and the Workshops That Carry the Craft

The geography is unusually tight. Three adjoining towns hold almost the entire industry, and one of them carries a startling share of it: Beit Sahour, with a population of roughly 15,000, held 135 registered olive wood carving workshops as of Al Jazeera's 2014 survey of the trade.

The workshops are family names before they are businesses. Khader Giacaman works as the fourth generation in a shop his great-grandfather established in 1955 on Milk Grotto Street in Bethlehem. In Beit Jala, Jeries Lolas manages a business his grandfather founded more than seventy years ago. In Beit Sahour, Jalal Musleh runs a two-room workshop with three friends and relatives, and Ibrahim Odeh manages the Odeh olive wood factory.

That mix, one large factory beside a dozen two-room shops, is the structure of the whole trade. It also sits alongside the other crafts of the same district: the embroidery traditions documented in Bethlehem's own heritage record, and the wheel-and-kiln workshops that keep Palestinian pottery alive further south.

The Trade Under Strain

The craft's dependence on pilgrims is not a background detail. Tourism accounts for about 70 percent of Bethlehem's annual income, and the olive wood workshops sit at the end of that chain. When arrivals stop, the workshops have no second market to fall back on.

Since the war on Gaza began in October 2023, arrivals have not recovered. Attalah Zacharia, a veteran carver whose family business was established in 1960, told Al Jazeera in April 2025 that his workforce had gone from 25 employees to 10, that the shop now opens two days a week, and that business was down 75 percent. His summary was four words long: there is no tourism, so there is no work.

Export was the remaining channel, and it is also narrowing. Bassem Giacaman, whose shop overlooks Manger Square, told Al Jazeera in the same April 2025 report that two of his clients had put orders on hold over a proposed 17 percent United States tariff on Palestinian goods exported through Israeli markets.

What is at risk is specific, and it is not the objects. Rosaries and nativity sets already sit in storerooms across Bethlehem in quantities nobody can sell. What disappears when a workshop closes is the six to seven year apprenticeship, because that training only transmits inside a working shop with orders coming in. A craft can survive a bad decade with its stock intact and still lose the generation that knew how to make more.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are olive trees cut down to make olive wood carvings?

No. The wood used in the Bethlehem workshops is branch wood removed during the pruning that follows the olive picking season. The trees stay in the ground and keep producing fruit, which is why the craft has a renewable supply at all.

Where is Palestinian olive wood carving made?

Almost entirely in three adjoining towns: Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. Beit Sahour holds the largest concentration of registered workshops relative to its size.

Why is olive wood carving associated with Christian objects?

Because the trade was organised around pilgrimage. Franciscan teaching centres from the sixteenth century onward trained carvers to supply visitors to the Church of the Nativity, and the repertoire followed the buyers. The carvers themselves are Palestinians of Bethlehem and its neighbouring towns, working a craft their families have held for generations.

How can a buyer tell genuine Bethlehem olive wood from an imitation?

Genuine pieces come with an origin that can be traced to a named workshop, and the grain gives them away: olive is irregular, with dark contrasting streaks that no two pieces repeat. Uniform grain across a batch is the clearest sign the wood is not olive.

Carrying the Craft Forward

The olive tree is already the most recognisable thing Palestine has, and its meaning is well documented in the story of the tree itself. The carving trade is the quieter half of that story: what the grove gives up after the fruit is picked, worked by hand in three towns, for four hundred years.

At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Symbols of Palestine collection, where the olive tree and the other symbols carried in Palestinian craft are worn rather than carved. 100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.