Can generations of Old World ceramics survive modern tastes?
Romanian town is home to 50 artisans who use traditional methods used for more than 300 years
HOREZU, Romania — Sorin Giubega’s grandfather was a potter. So was his father. And at 8 years old, Giubega said, he started to play on a pottery wheel, too.
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 by car from Bucharest.
Horezu is home to a community of about 50 artisans who make a traditional style of ceramics with methods that have been practiced for more than 300 years. In 2012, Horezu pottery was recognized as an 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 artisans advertise their craft by hanging ceramic plates outside their houses, some of which have yards where they keep roosters and pigs.
On a Monday afternoon in early May, Giubega, who was wearing a clay-caked apron, showed off a shelf of ceramic honey pots and jam jars that his grandfather had made in the 1920s.
“This is the story of my life!” said Giubega, who was named a Living Human Treasure by Romania’s Ministry of Culture in 2021.
Artisans in Horezu work year-round, and the ceramics are made by two potters with distinct roles. Modelers, who are typically men, shape clay into pieces. Decorators, who are typically women, paint the pieces using ancestral motifs that include spirals, waves, spider webs, roosters, serpents, fish and an arboreal 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 decorating. “It’s like handwriting.”
Many modelers and decorators, including the Giubegas, are married couples. Constantin Biscu, 49, and his wife, Mihaela Biscu, 42, make pottery at their home on Olari Street, where he works at a kick wheel on which he can make up to 300 pieces in a day, he said.
“It’s hard; it’s dirty,” Biscu said of the clammy gray clay that he and others used, which customarily comes from earth extracted from a hill in Horezu. Many potters’ families have owned parcels of the hill for generations.
Decorators also work at wheels and with specialized tools, such as one instrument that resembles a fountain pen. It is made with an ox horn and quills from goose or duck feathers, and it is used to draw certain designs and to apply paints, which are typically muted hues 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 such as the spider web, decorators use two other tools: a brush with bristles made of cat whiskers or boar hair, and a twig with a metal pin on one end.
Once pieces are decorated and fully dried, they are loaded into a kiln and fired for hours. After that, they are glazed and fired again.
This month, many of the potters in Horezu will showcase and sell their wares at two folk art fairs in Romania.
The first, the Cocosul de Hurez, or Rooster of Horezu, is a local ceramics fair named for the bird that residents of the town see as symbolic of the home. The second, the Cucuteni 5000, is a national ceramics fair that takes place in Iasi, some eight hours by car from Horezu. It is named for the Cucuteni people, who, around 5000 B.C., started to make decorated pottery in what is now Romania.
In recent years, as interest in ceramics has grown, pottery from Horezu has started 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.
“Demand is really high at the moment,” Alice Munteanu, the Romanian-born owner of Casa De Folklore, said on a video call. She recently sold tableware made in Horezu to the owners of Clover, a restaurant in Paris.