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Black pottery of Marginea
 

Located in the North of Romania, a few km have of Radauti in Bucovine, at the edge of the forests centenaries, the village of Marginea is famous especially by its black pottery.

This pottery kept for essence the features which it had with the Neolithic era: the form remains unchanged as well as the technique of cooking and ornamentation. This pottery is of indigenous, Dacia tradition and one finds it on territory of Moldavia and of the east of Transylvania. It acts of only village having perpetuated this tradition.

black pottery is based on same clay as the red pottery, the difference consist only in the technology of cooking, which, in the case black pottery, is incomplete, inoxydante, while for red pottery oxidation is complete and the matter take the colours oxide.

Some details on the cooking of black pottery. After a fire oxidizing very extremely, which reddens the pots, one introduced large logs of fir tree and one closes the openings of the furnace. During ten hours with slow furnace, incomplete reaction of dioxide of coal produces the in-depth black colour.

The black colour obtained by oxidation partial of the iron of clay is due also to the deposit black coal dust which penetrates in mass, result of smoke stopped inside the furnace. The ornaments are carried out using a hard stone, quartz rounded, before cooking.

The decorative effect obtained after cooking is remarkable, the traces are brilliant and harmonize themselves in a new way with the black chechmate pot.

At the beginning of this century, there existed in Marginea more one hundred families which controlled the secrecy of the black pottery in using an old, certainly contemporary technology with discovered the first cooking of clay.

This technique, antique and current at the same time, are single in the world, bus Marginea is the only place where the colour is obtained black, without anything to add to the clay paste, only by fire.
Currently there exists in Marginea a workshop where work about fifteen Masters craftsmen.

• the procuration of Clay
• the cleaning of clay
• standardization of clay
• the creation of the pots
• cooking.

The national and world appreciation of this original and single creation is unanimous. Magopat, men and simple women of the village, accomodated in their house of the personalities whole world, the such Akihito emperor of Japan, the Juliana queen of The Netherlands, king Michel of Romania, ambassadors in station in Romania, of the politicians of yesterday and today, of the scenario writers, journalists of the whole world, ethnographers, folklorists, critical of art. The black pottery of Marginea is known by the specialists, amateurs and collectors of all the meridian lines of the sphere. Much of diplomas and of the prices, decreed on the occasions of the fairs and international demonstrations rewarded work for the craftsmen for black pottery.

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