Tabarka (Tunisia) (AFP)
Leaning over his century-old machine, Anis Bouchnak methodically transforms the heather lining the north of Tunisia into hand-shaped pipes, a unique know-how brought back from Europe half a century ago by his grandfather and which he hears " perpetuate "in turn.
The family workshop has been installed for about fifty years in an alley in Tabarka, a pleasant tourist town a few kilometers from Algeria, clinging to green slopes plunging into the Mediterranean.
The agricultural region of Kroumirie has long been known for its cork oaks but also for its briar wood, which has long supplied French pipe factories.
In 1968, Chedly Bouchnak, Anis' grandfather, brought back from Switzerland where he was traveling on business, a rasp, a drill and other woodworking machines to transform the heather.
The French pipe makers refused to pass on their know-how to him.
It was therefore while spying through the window of a workshop in Saint-Claude, a French town in the Jura region considered to be the capital of the briar pipe, that Chedly learned the manufacturing secrets.
- "Passing the torch" -
Bouchnak pipes have acquired a certain notoriety but Anis, who had lived in France since he was ten years old and worked in the restoration, never imagined taking over.
In 2011, after the death of his grandfather and his father, he returned to Tunisia and decided to relaunch the workshop.
A Tunisian collector "gave me the passion for this work and showed me the future prospects of this profession," he told AFP.
A master pipe maker, an employee of his grandfather, showed him all the tricks before his death in 2020.
Anis, 37, now creates original but still functional models himself.
He is the only one in Tunisia, and one of the few in the region, to continue to make pipes by hand.
Customers of the beginnings, intellectual smokers, lawyers, doctors or the political world succeeded a clientele of collectors and diplomats "who seek to offer something original".
Heather is appreciated by connoisseurs for its resistance to heat and for its neutral taste which allows you to enjoy the aromas of tobacco.
"I am proud to be the only pipe maker in Tunisia but, frankly, I would have liked to have competition because that would have motivated me to progress", says the craftsman with his hands thickened by work.
"It's a whole market that is mine but it is a burden to be the only pipe maker, because I have the responsibility to perpetuate this profession and to pass the torch to someone else", confides he.
Anis already has two apprentices and lots of work.
“Everything I do directly share,” he says.
- "Ali Baba" -
It was in the tin-roofed workshop, installed in a courtyard of the family house, that he found his inspiration.
"With all these old machines, I have the impression of going back in time and (...) to keep the way of making pipes the old way, like my father and my grandfather in the past", confides he.
"For me, it's a workshop-museum with a soul".
So much so that he does the housework to a minimum, letting the spiders settle on the machines.
His work begins by choosing a piece of wood, called a blank, in his "Ali Baba's cave", a room whose floor is covered by the family treasure: small blocks of heather which have sometimes dried for twenty years.
"I have a quantity that would be enough for me for ten more years" by making two pipes a day, emphasizes Anis.
The brush, the strain of tree heather, must first be cut up, then boiled for twelve hours and dried for four to twenty years: the quality improves with age.
The craftsman drills the wood, shapes it with a rasp and then with an abrasive belt machine.
“I could work with new machinery, it would make my job easier, but I prefer to continue working manually because there is a satisfaction in doing something that comes out of the mind and out of the hand,” he explains.
Tunisian crafts have suffered deeply from the collapse of tourism due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
But Anis accumulates orders by offering "something other than the dromedary, the palm tree and the carpet".
© 2021 AFP