Can old world pottery survive modern tastes?

Sorin Giubega’s grandfather was a potter. His father too. And at age 8, Mr. Giubega said, he, too, began playing on a pottery wheel.

Mr. Giubega, now 63, and his wife, Marieta Giubega, 48, are potters in Horezu, Romania, a town in the foothills of the Capatanii Mountains, about a three-hour drive away. from Bucharest.

Horezu is home to a community of about 50 artisans who make a traditional style of pottery using methods that have been practiced for over 300 years. In 2012, Horezu pottery was recognized as a Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

Most of Horezu’s potters, including the Giubegas, live on Olari Street (“olari” means potters in Romanian), where they work in home studios. The artisans advertise their craft by hanging ceramic plates outside their houses, some of which have patios where they raise roosters and pigs.

On a Monday afternoon in early May, Giubega, wearing a clay-covered apron, held up a rack of ceramic honey jars and jam jars that his grandfather had made in the 1920s.

“This is the story of my life!” said Mr. Giubega, who was named a Living Human Treasure by the Romanian Ministry of Culture in 2021.

Traditional Techniques

Horezu artisans work throughout the year and the pottery is made by two potters with different roles. The modelers, who are usually men, mold the clay into pieces. The decorators, typically women, paint the pieces with ancient motifs that include spirals, waves, cobwebs, roosters, snakes, fish, and a tree-like design known as the tree of life, which is dotted with apples.

“We are all doing the same thing, but we each have our own style,” said Aida Frigura, 44, a potter in Horezu who specializes in decoration. “It’s like writing by hand.”

Many modelers and decorators, like the Giubegas, are married couples. Constantin Biscu, 49, and his wife, Mihaela Biscu, 42, make pottery at his home on Olari Street, where Biscu works on a wheel that he can make up to 300 pieces in a day. He said.

“It’s hard, it’s dirty,” Biscu said of the wet gray clay he and others use, which usually comes from dirt dug from a hill in Horezu. Many families of potters have owned plots on the hill for generations.

Decorators also work on wheels and with specialized tools, such as an instrument that resembles a fountain pen. It is made from an ox horn and goose or duck feather quills, and is used for drawing certain designs and applying paints, which are often muted shades of green, blue, ivory, red, and brown. The potters formulate their own paints using copper and cobalt powders, as well as minerals found in the area.

To create intricate web-like patterns, decorators use two other tools: a brush with bristles made from cat’s whiskers or boar hair, and a twig with a metal pin attached to one end.

Once the pieces are decorated and completely dry, they are loaded into a kiln and fired for hours. After that, they are glazed and fired again.

Vessels in Vogue

This month, many of Horezu’s potters will exhibit and sell their wares at two folk art fairs in Romania.

The first, the The Hurez Rooster, or Gallo de Horezu, is a local pottery fair named after the bird that the villagers see as a symbol of home. The second, the cucuteni 5000, is a national ceramics fair that takes place in Iasi, about an eight-hour drive from Horezu. It is named for the cucuteni peoplewho, around the year 5000 B.C. C., began making decorated pottery in what is now Romania.

In recent years, as interest in pottery has grown up, Horezu pottery has begun appearing in the trendiest design-oriented retailers around the world, including Lost & Found, in Los Angeles; FindersKeepers, in Copenhagen; International Wardrobe, in Berlin; Cabana, in Milan; and House Of Folklore, in London.

“Demand is really high right now,” Alice Munteanu, the Romanian owner of Casa De Folklore, said in a video call. She recently sold Horezu-made tableware to the owners of Clover, a restaurant in Paris. Ms Munteanu said the decorating industry is fond of craft right now, adding that if it’s “dark” (she used air quotes), that’s even better.

Herle Jarlgaard, owner of FindersKeepers, first encountered the pottery in 2021 at a flea market in Italy, where she found a plate painted with rings and trippy marble dots along the rim. At its bottom was the word “Horezu”.

“Wow!” Ms Jarlgaard, 35, recalled thinking after seeing the dish.

When she tried to contact potters in Horezu, Mrs. Jarlgaard had difficulties at first. She eventually connected with Maria Stefanescu, a decorator, through the instagram account that Ms. Stefanescu’s son, a police officer in Bucharest, had created to promote his mother’s work.

Since then, FindersKeepers began buying pottery in bulk from Ms. Stefanescu, a decorator who works with an unrelated modeler. The retailer, which buys hundreds of pieces at a time, has paid him about $50,000 for orders from her to date, Jarlgaard said.

At FindersKeepers, the smallest ceramics are around $25 and the largest pieces are around $75. The pottery is shipped to Copenhagen by truck. “I get very anxious when orders travel,” Stefanescu said. “I do not sleep!”

Ms Stefanescu, who said she can decorate up to 50 pieces a day, was unable to estimate her overall costs for making individual ceramics. She said her biggest expenses include electricity for her two ovens and the hourly wage she pays the modeler she works with. Like other potters, Ms. Stefanescu offsets household expenses by growing vegetables and raising animals for food.

modern concerns

UNESCO’s designation of Horezu ceramics as intangible cultural heritage was a proud moment for Romania, said Virgil Nitulescu, director of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest. Corina Mihaescu, anthropologist at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in Bucharest, he said UNESCO’s recognition has led more young people to take up the trade.

To maintain the designation, a state of the art report must be submitted every six years to UNESCO. The report explains, among other things, what measures have been taken to keep the Horezu pottery tradition alive and what tools and techniques the potters are using.

Dr. Mihaescu produced the most recent state of the art report, which was presented last year by the Romanian Ministry of Culture. She said there are always concerns about how to retain the UNESCO designation, and maintain the integrity of the ceramic tradition, in the face of modern influences.

to accomplish with European regulations By limiting the use of heavy metals like lead and cadmium in ceramic glazes that can come into contact with food, many potters now use electric kilns instead of wood-fired kilns. Electric kilns can more reliably reach the higher temperatures (around 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit) needed to fire food-safe glazes.

Other Horezu potters have started using prepared clay instead of making it themselves. And certain decorators have begun painting ceramics with unconventional colors and motifs; Ms. Stefanescu, for example, has used bright red, yellow and pink. Some of the newer designs are sought after by sellers outside of Romania, many of whom tend to eschew age-old animal motifs in favor of bold, monochrome palettes.

“We say, ‘Our client, our master,’ but I have the last word,” Stefanescu said. On incorporating atypical colors into his pieces, he added: “I like to try new things.”

Constantin Popa, 62, who makes pottery in Horezu with his wife, Georgeta Popa, 57, said they try to fulfill customers’ wishes as much as possible. But according to him, painting pieces with saturated colors “has nothing to do with Horezu.”

Tim Curtis, the head of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Programsaid in an email that the designation has been withdrawn only twice in the 20 years since the agency began airing it, and that the time was not due to factors related to the modernization of procedures or design. He added that the designation takes into account changes communities can make to practices.

There are plans to open the Olari Cultural Center, a new institution on Olari Street, in September. It will exhibit Horezu pottery, host lectures and present pottery demonstrations.

The cultural center was paid for by the city of Horezu and the Romanian government. Daniela Ogrezeanu, a spokeswoman for Horezu mayor Nicolae Sardarescu, described it in an email as a way to draw more attention to ceramics and their makers by bringing tourists to the streets where many live and work.

But some Horezu residents worry that visitors won’t make it to the center. Olari Street is about a 10-minute drive from the entrance to the city, which is lined with souvenir shops. Many sell pottery from Bulgaria that tourists mistake for local pottery, said Laurentiu Pietraru, 52, a potter and shop owner in Horezu who sells pottery made in the city for about $2 to $54.

“That’s why I label everything,” said Pietraru, whose wife, Nicoleta Pietraru, 47, is a fifth-generation potter.