Growing with hand crafts

Bascarsija is the old centre of Sarajevo (Bosnia Herzegovina) where people for centuries have been crafting metals, wool and leather. The community is still alive, but only a few people still live of weaving or hitting with a hammer. In one of the traditional shops I noticed two children playing around a table with large, heavy plate of lead. The plate was soft - hammer and other tool would easily leave marks on the strong but vulnerable surface. The plate’s specific quality provides the necessary support for forming copper, silver and even golden plates, each by individual unique design.

The children’s father told me that the craft is slowly dying out. He himself has learned the craft from his father and his father from his grandfather, and so on. The sounds and smells form his childhood have remained in his life. He doubts that he would ever choose this occupation without his experience from the childhood. The childhood experiences seem to have provided him with interest, appreciation, love… and will to continue… He told me that he still had much to learn about crafting plates and coffee cans, even though he has literally been learning by doing for the last 16 years.

I left the shop while the children were still playing, and entered a large open marked with thousands of scarves and carpets form India, Iran and Turkey: It was such a colourful sight, pleasant for eye and hand. The shop assistant spoke with devotion about materials’ qualities and origin, about different techniques and time it takes to make a single carpet in traditional hand craft. We ended (again) in talking about childhood: He was brought up in a village in Iran, surrounded by aunts and grandmothers who were constantly spinning wool, colouring, and weaving… I believe that his early experience of qualities had given him possibility to develop differentiated perception, aesthetic attention and passion to study arts history … and handle the textiles between hands.