Ceramics and pottery

Two kinds of potter

The pottery used in Transylvanian villages came from two sources. On one side were potters' villages, where farmers worked clay between seasons in the fields and took mostly everyday, unglazed vessels to the fairs. On the other were potters organised in town guilds, who made mainly glazed ware, much of it decorative, though also for use in the home.

The Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania explains that a preference for certain shapes, techniques, motifs and colours gradually produced a style specific to each centre. These styles stayed recognisable even after the guilds were dissolved. That is why, at a case of old pottery, a trained eye can often tell where a jug comes from by its colours and by how the decoration is laid out.

The region also took in influences from outside. The museum mentions the Haban potters, an Anabaptist community brought from Moravia between 1621 and 1629 and settled at Vințu de Jos. They brought a more advanced technique and a Central European style of ornament that shaped the forms, motifs and colours of Transylvanian guild pottery.

How a pot was made

The museum displays the potter's tools, some from before and some from after 1900: the hoe for digging clay, the shovel, the mallet used to beat the clay until it was even, scrapers for removing impurities, the potter's wheel, combs for shaping a vessel's profile, plates of pigment, brushes, and horns for decorating. At Leheceni, clay dug from deep down was left outdoors for a while, then beaten, cut into very thin slices to clean it, kneaded and thrown on the wheel.

Decoration relied on a few basic techniques. Slip coats the vessel in a layer of clay, often white, which is then painted over. Horn painting uses an animal horn as the tool for drawing the decoration. In the sgraffito centres, the design was scratched into this layer. Glaze makes the vessel watertight and more durable. Some centres burnished the pot with a stone before firing, which closed the pores and gave it a sheen.

Black pottery is made by firing without air. At Josenii Bârgăului, once the vessels reached the point at which red ware would have been finished, the top of the kiln was sealed with clay and the firing carried on, smothered. That produced the black colour, with a metallic lustre wherever the pot had been rubbed with stone. A related technique is still practised today at Marginea, in Suceava County, where black pottery is coloured by smoke.

Pottery centres and their signatures

The museum's display in Cluj shows how different the centres were. Sgraffito ware from the Iza Valley and Baia Mare keeps to yellow and green on a white ground, with an airy layout. Vama, in Satu Mare County, kept sgraffito but chose a palette in which red plays the leading part. The Hungarian guild centres of Zalău, Turda, Iara, Odorhei and Ocna Sibiului made tall jugs and pitchers decorated with flowers and birds, influenced by Baroque ornament.

Zalău, not far from Cluj, was known for the elegance of its vessels. The museum describes a jug from the second half of the 19th century, 21.5 cm tall, coated in white slip and horn-painted with plant and geometric motifs in blue, brown, green, black and orange. Blue usually dominates the jugs from this centre.

Corund, in Harghita County, is one of the most active centres today. A study published in the journal Transilvania in 2024 counts about 250 potters working in workshops there in 2023. The same study notes that fewer and fewer use the traditional decoration and that new production draws on influences from Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy and Spain. For national context, the craftsmanship of Horezu ceramics, from Vâlcea County, was inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2012. There, men prepare the clay and women decorate the pieces in dark brown, red, green, blue and Horezu ivory.

Two potters' houses in the Ethnographic Park

In the Romulus Vuia National Ethnographic Park, on Hoia hill, there are two potters' houses brought to Cluj from their villages. The house from Leheceni, Bihor County, dates from the second half of the 18th century and is built of thick oak beams. Its pantry was turned into a workshop. The people of Leheceni made unglazed red pottery with white or brown ornament: cooking pots, milk jugs, bowls, water pitchers. The kiln burned for 12 to 14 hours, and the pots were taken to market in carts lined with straw and sold for money or grain.

The potter's house from Josenii Bârgăului, Bistrița-Năsăud County, comes from a village that was an important centre of unglazed black pottery. Pottery making there stopped shortly after the Second World War. The outbuilding with the kiln displays the centre's full range of forms, reconstructed by one of the village's last potters. As at Leheceni, the potters were farmers who worked clay in the quieter parts of the year.

The collection in the city centre

The Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania is housed in the Reduta Palace at 21 Memorandumului Street. Its permanent exhibition, "Folk Culture of Transylvania, 18th–20th Centuries", opened in 2006 and draws on more than 40,000 artefacts in the museum's holdings. Pottery fills several sections: unglazed ware from Romanian centres, sgraffito ware, Hungarian and Saxon guild pottery, 19th-century stove tiles, and Haban ware from the 17th and 18th centuries.

The collection has a long history. The Zalău jug described above entered the museum in 1923, during the first research campaigns led by the institution's founder, the ethnologist Romulus Vuia. The museum has also staged temporary exhibitions on single centres, such as the one on the pottery of the Deja centre, which came with a trilingual catalogue published in 2019. Both the Reduta Palace and the Ethnographic Park are open Wednesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00, according to the museum's website.

The craft at university level

Clay is still studied in Cluj at university level. The University of Art and Design Cluj-Napoca has a Ceramics-Glass-Metal department within its Faculty of Decorative Arts and Design. The department runs bachelor's and master's programmes, and the university also takes in students from other countries on these courses through Erasmus+.

Where to try it in Cluj

Ceramic Cafe, at 4 Samuel Brassai Street with its entrance on David Ferenc Street, near the Brassai high school, is a café where you choose a white ceramic piece, paint it, and the studio then glazes and fires it. An article on cluj.com says the price of a piece depends on its size and that brushes and paints are provided on site. Opening hours differ between sources, so check their Facebook page before you go.

If you would rather work clay from scratch, the ceramicist Vanessa Singenzia runs a two-session course in her studio on Piața 1 Mai, listed on the Homo Faber platform. In the first session you shape your piece, and in the second, once the clay has dried, you glaze it. The course runs to 10 hours in total, for groups of 3 to 7, and costs 300 lei per person according to the listing. Booking ahead is required.