Mohammad Hassan worries about the steady decline in the number of customers who come to his shop in Baghdad’s Souk al-Safafeer, the legendary copper market in the neighborhood of Bab al-Agha. The shop sports Hassan’s handmade copper products, mostly miniatures of Iraq’s symbols and monuments, such as the palm tree, the Lion of Babylon, the Malwiya Minaret in Samarra and Mosul’s Great Mosque of al-Nuri, which the Islamic State destroyed in 2017.

Hassan, who has been a coppersmith for 30 years, exercises a profession that dates to the Abbasid period of the 10th century, when many everyday goods, from lanterns to water bottles and from cups to knives and daggers, were made of copper. But those days are long gone.

“Industrial development has turned this profession into a business that only provides decorative objects,” Hassan told Al-Monitor in his shop in Souk al-Safafeer, which takes its name from the color of copper, “safra” in Arabic.

The situation is similar in all coppersmiths’ markets around the country. In Nasiriyah, a city on the banks of the Euphrates River about 370 kilometers (225 miles) southeast of Baghdad, the copper market, once an important place of commerce and socialization, is now almost nonexistent. The same goes for Mosul’s market, Basra’s Musa al-Attiyah market and Najaf’s Safafeer market, which are turning into mere memories.