There is a special workshop for pottery - of the royal kind – used by the boyar families from the time of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom (12^th – 14^th C.) in what was once the capital of Bulgaria – Veliko Tarnovo. The workshop is located at the beginning of the Samovodska Charshia - the city’s old crafts street and marketplace, now an ethnographic and architectural complex. It is perhaps the only place in the country where visitors can see how the pottery is made applying a technique called sgraffito (ceramic decoration by cutting away/scratching parts of the surface layer).

In Bulgaria, sgraffito pottery also goes by the name of Tarnovo pottery because such pottery sherds have been found during excavations on Tsarevets hill – the place where the royal palace rose during the Second Bulgarian Kingdom. Vessels of this kind were only used at the boyar palace. That is the reason why Tarnovo pottery was nor well known to the ordinary people, and the craft was lost and forgotten after Bulgaria fell under Ottoman rule at the end of the 14^th century.

The vessels are made of red clay, and are left until it is firm. They are then dipped in diluted white clay – and are taken out right away and the clay is again allowed to rest until it is firm. And that is precisely the trick in sgraffito – knowing how long to keep the vessel in the solution. And it is in these 15 minutes or so that the master craftsman has to engrave the vessel to get the desired decoration.

Thus, the process of making any item – from the clay ball to the beautifully engraved vessel – takes no less than one month. And every step takes patience and attention to detail, because nothing can be skipped in this job which looks so enjoyable. Maybe that is the reason why the master craftsmen making Tarnovo pottery can be counted on the fingers of one hand, says Dimitar Neshev who works at one of the oldest workshops in Veliko Tarnovo’s Samovodska Charshia.

Here we find out that the craft was revived technologically thanks to the boyar pottery discovered during archaeological excavations years ago. “There is no other sgraffito pottery workshop in the city, ours is the only one left,” says the young master craftsman and goes on:

“It is very important to keep to the technology, or you will be discarding many of the items you are making. Everything is mineral-based, there is no lead or any dangerous substances, that is why this pottery can be eaten out of.”

The symbols and the patterns used in Tarnovo pottery have been the subject of comprehensive scientific research even though, on the whole, this type of pottery is not well known or widespread in the country – as is Troyan pottery, for example. What makes Tarnovo pottery different from other sgraffito schools in Europe is that is has more diverse geometric patterns, floral elements and animals, most often eagles, lions and fish, fine tracery and animal applications, and the typical yellow and green colour scheme. The pottery from the 12^th-14^th century depicts mostly birds and more specifically eagles, regarded as a royal symbol during the Second Bulgarian Kingdom. This is a tradition the workshop run by the Neshevs in Tarnovo adheres to. “That is the reason why our pottery supplements some museum expositions which want to demonstrate what life and culture was like during the Second Bulgarian Kingdom,” says Dimitar Neshev further:

“No one does sgraffito anymore because the technology is so time and labour consuming. We use two furnaces – one takes 5 hours, and the other 7.  The furnaces use electricity and that raises labour costs, and when we add the materials that raises the price of our products even more. I would like for people, especially young people, when they come to our workshop, to see what crafts mean, what the life of our ancestors was like, and how they recreated life in art. I would like to see our pottery preserved, and carried on by someone, because there is no way high-tech can take the place of such beauty.”


More:

• Veliko Tarnovo – a town both ancient and young
• After a long pause potter's wheels in Busintsi are turning again

Photos: Gergana Mancheva, Zdravka Maslyankova
Translated and posted by Milena Daynova