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By Conrad Prabhu

Sitting in the Al Haffa Souq in downtown Salalah, 55-year-old Radhiya bint Addan Ashoor, reflects on a life centred around the vibrant frankincense trade of the Dhofar region: "I have been making and selling traditional fragrances all my adult life, following in the footsteps of my mother before me, and expect some of my children to follow suit as well."

Source of Frankincense: Boswellia tree. — Pictures by Abdulla Ibrahim al Shuhi

This sentiment mirrors the lives of hundreds of other Omani women, and men as well, who have taken to the gum resin of the Boswellia tree to make a living.

Blended with traditional ingredients like oudh, sandalwood and attar, an exotic variety of fragrances and essences are created, each with a distinctive character that connoisseurs say can potentially rival international haute couture perfume brands.

Al Haffa Souq, an exclusive market for frankincense and perfumes, offers in fact a fascinating insight into the heady world of traditional fragrances. The rows of stalls built by Dhofar Municipality are chock-full with a myriad varieties of fragrances, the products of closely-guarded family secrets. Also on display are a large range of incense burners and assorted bric-a-brac.

Exotic varieties of incense-based bokhur fragrances displayed at the Al Haffa souq, dedicated to the frankincense trade

Radhiya has about a dozen such exotic blends of the traditional fragrance bokhur, each bearing a romantic name such as 'Jewel of Life' or 'Love Ultimate'.

Bokhur-making varies from one blender to another, but the most exotic types include ingredients like oudh (scented wood from India and the Far East), sandalwood, attar, rose water, myrrh, raw perfume oils and a variety of aromatic resins and extracts. These are blended in a certain proportion, cooked together and crushed to form a richly-fragranced powder.

The veteran fragrance-maker's bokhur products are much in demand, coveted mainly by GCC nationals who buy up substantial quantities of this prized incense. Small jam-jar size bottles of the fragrance sell for as much as RO15 a bottle. The most expensive brands are recommended for brides and young girls.

"Business was very good last year," says Radhiya, who has been renting a stall at Al Haffa for the last 16 years. "I sold between 15-20kg of bokhur products during the last khareef, mainly to visitors from the UAE."

Fragrance-blending is a closely guarded family secret. Many Gulf travellers are known to return to the same Omani blender year after year to buy their requirements of bokhur

While frankincense is the essential ingredient in almost all traditional fragrances, some blenders use musk, attar and select raw perfumes imported from Switzerland for their distinctive brands of bokhur. The longer the release of its exotic scents, the more expensive and prized is the bokhur, says Radhiya.

Majority of dealers at the Al Haffa Souq source their frankincense needs directly from farmers who harvest the resin from the numerous Boswellia trees that grow on the fringes of the arid Nejd desert or the drier, lower reaches of the jabals.

From incisions made on the trunk of these trees oozes a pearly white liquid that hardens into semi-opaque lumps. These are periodically scraped off by local villagers and sold to traders in Salalah.

From incisions made on the trunk of Boswellia tree oozes the pearly white liquid — frankincense

The freshly-harvested gum resin is sorted into four principal varieties of frankincense, according to its colour. Light pastel shades of frankincense, originating from the Nejd, sell for up to RO5 per kg, while darker shades cost between RO2-3 per kilogramme.

In antiquity, the Dhofar region was the source of some of the finest frankincense traded in those times, spawning the rise of ancient cities like the fabled Ubar and Samharam. For centuries frankincense was the key merchandise of ancient trade with Greece, Rome, Egypt, China and India, bringing fabulous wealth to parts of Arabia where the aromatic gum resin was produced.

History is rich with accounts of this trade, and the use of frankincense in ancient Roman and Greek religious rituals.

Roman fleets and Arabian dhows shipped annually thousands of tonnes of this most precious of commodities to Rome. Pliny, the best known historian of the time, noted that colossal quantities of frankincense was ordered burnt by Emperor Nero at the last rites of his departed wife.

While Omanis prefer frankincense, visitors from the UAE buy incense-based bokhur fragrances.

Two millennia later, frankincense is still central to Dhofar's, and indeed the rest of Oman and the Gulf region's heritage.

In Omani homes across the Sultanate, frankincense and other traditional scents are indispensable to the ritual of demonstrating one's hospitality to visiting guests. Incense burners are passed around so visitors can air themselves in the heady scent of the burning frankincense.

Fragrance-blending is a major cottage industry in Salalah, involving hundreds of Omani families Festive events like weddings, Eid celebrations, the birth of a newborn, and so on, are also incomplete without the burning of frankincense or its exotic versions like bokhur. Such is the pivotal place these prized fragrances enjoy in the daily lives of the people of the Sultanate.

Oman Observer 17th July 2002