Can Old World Ceramics Survive Modern Flavors?

Sorin Giubega’s grandfather was a potter. So was his father. And at the age of 8, Mr. Giubega said, he also started playing on a potter’s 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 three hours away by car. from Bucharest.

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

Most potters in Horezu, including the Giubegas, live on Olari Street (“olari” means potters in Romanian), where they work in home studios. The craftsmen advertise their craft by hanging ceramic signs outside their homes, some of which have yards where they keep roosters and pigs.

On a Monday afternoon in early May, Mr. Giubega, wearing a clay-caked apron, displayed a shelf of ceramic honey and jam jars his grandfather had made in the 1920s.

“This is the story of my life!” said Mr. Giubega, who was declared a living human treasure by the Romanian Ministry of Culture in 2021.

Traditional techniques

Artisans in Horezu work all year round and the ceramics are made by two potters with different roles. Modelers, typically men, shape clay into pieces. Decorators, who are typically women, paint the pieces with ancestral motifs such as spirals, waves, cobwebs, roosters, snakes, fish, and a tree design known as the Tree of Life, which is dotted with apples.

“We all do the same thing, but we all have our own style,” says Aida Frigura, 44, a potter in Horezu who specializes in decorating. “It’s like handwriting.”

Many modellers and decorators, such as de Giubegas, are married couples. Constantin Biscu, 49, and his wife, Mihaela Biscu, 42, make pottery at their home on Olari Street, where Mr. Biscu works on a shovel wheel on which he can make up to 300 pieces a day, he said.

“It’s hard, it’s dirty,” Mr. Biscu said of the clammy gray clay he and others use, which usually comes from soil quarried from a hillside in Horezu. Many potter families have owned plots of the mound for generations.

Decorators also work on wheels and with specialized tools, such as one that resembles a fountain pen. It is made with an ox horn and goose or duck feather pens, and it is used to draw and paint certain designs, which are typically muted shades of green, blue, ivory, red, and brown. Potters formulate their own paints using copper and cobalt powders, as well as minerals found in the area.

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

Once the pieces are decorated and completely dried, they are loaded into an oven and baked for hours. Then they are glazed and fired again.

Ships in fashion

This month many of the potters in Horezu will display and sell their wares at two folk art fairs in Romania.

The first, the Coconut de Hurez, or Rooster of Horezu, is a local ceramics fair named after the bird that residents of the city see as a symbol of the home. The second, the Cucuteni 5000, is a national ceramics fair that takes place in Iasi, about eight hours from Horezu. It is named after the Cucuteni people, who started making decorated pottery around 5000 BC in what is now Romania.

In recent years, as interest in ceramics has grown, Horezu pottery has begun to appear at more trendy design-oriented retailers around the world, including Lost & Found in Los Angeles; FindersKeepers, in Copenhagen; International Wardrobe, in Berlin; Cabana, in Milan; and Casa De Folklore, in London.

“The demand is very high right now,” Alice Munteanu, the Romanian-born owner of Casa De Folklore, said during a video call. She recently sold tableware made in Horezu to the owners of Clover, a restaurant in Paris. Ms Munteanu said the decoration industry is very fond of craft work at the moment, adding that if it’s “obscure” – she used air quotes – that was even better.

Herle Jarlgaard, an owner of FindersKeepers, first came across the pottery in 2021 at a flea market in Italy, where she found a plate painted with trippy marbled rings and dots along the rim. On the bottom was the word ‘Horezu’.

“Wow!” Ms. Jarlgaard, 35, remembered thinking after seeing the sign.

When she tried to contact potters in Horezu, Mrs. Jarlgaard had a hard time at first. She eventually came into contact with Maria Stefanescu, an interior designer, through the Instagram account that the son of Mrs. Stefanescu, a Bucharest police officer, had made to promote his mother’s work.

FindersKeepers has since started buying ceramics wholesale from Ms. Stefanescu, a decorator who works with a modeller to whom she is not related. The retailer, who buys hundreds of pieces at a time, has paid her about $50,000 for his orders so far, Ms Jarlgaard said.

At FindersKeepers, smaller ceramics cost about $25 and larger pieces about $75. The pottery is trucked to Copenhagen. “I get very worried when the orders travel,” Ms. Stefanescu said. “I do not sleep!”

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

Modern concerns

UNESCO’s designation of Horezu pottery as Intangible Cultural Heritage was a proud moment for Romania, said Virgil Nitulescu, the director of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest. Corina Mihaescu, an anthropologist at the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore in Bucharest, said the recognition by UNESCO has led to more young people entering the profession.

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

Dr. Mihaescu produced the most recent state-of-the-craft report, which was submitted last year by the Romanian Ministry of Culture. She said there are always concerns about preserving the UNESCO designation — and preserving the integrity of the pottery tradition — in the face of modern influences.

Comply European regulations By limiting the use of heavy metals such as lead and cadmium in glazes for ceramics that may come into contact with food, many potters now use electric kilns instead of wood-fired kilns. The electric ovens can more reliably reach the higher temperatures — about 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit — needed to bake food-safe glazes.

Other potters in Horezu have started using ready-made clay instead of making their own. And certain decorators have begun to paint the pottery in unconventional motifs and colours; For example, Mrs. Stefanescu has used bright red as well as yellow and pink. Some of the newer designs have been requested by sellers outside of Romania, many of whom tend to avoid ancestral animal motifs and prefer bolder and monochromatic palettes.

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

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

Tim Curtis, head of UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage program, said in an email that the designation has only been revoked twice in the 20 years since the agency began publishing it, and that there was no time for factors related to the modernization of procedures or design. He added that the designation takes into account the changes communities can make in practices.

There are plans to open the Olari Cultural Center, a new institution on Olari Street, in September. It will exhibit Horezu ceramics, host conferences and showcase potters’ 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 the pottery and its makers by driving tourists to the street where many live and work.

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

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