Cluj county had thousands of glassworkers. Today “atelier sticlă Cluj” returns fourteen glaziers

Fabrica de Sticlărie S.A. was founded in 1921. Its principal shareholder was the Central Bank for Industry and Commerce of Cluj, holding 75%. Construction took a year and began by clearing land given by Simon Mendel, a large landowner and the owner of the Turda brewery.

It started with a single melting furnace. Three years later it had three.

The problem was that there were no skilled workers. They were brought in from Germany, Poland, Italy and Czechoslovakia.

What follows is the part worth keeping. They moved to training on the job, and the mechanism was simple and explicit: every glassworker was paid a set sum of money for each young person he managed to teach the trade.

A vocational school followed, where young people from around Turda were prepared for the factory.

The skill we are talking about did not appear on its own. It was manufactured deliberately, paid for by the head, and then institutionalised.

1929: between five and six hundred employees. The director was Grigore Bozdog, from the Turda area, who built the factory “colony” on the bank of the Arieș — workers' housing, a shop, a club, a sports ground.

Before 1989: over five thousand people.

2005: one thousand two hundred. 2006: seven hundred and sixty. By 2014 the sources describe it on the brink of bankruptcy.

Today, at Strada Fabricii 71 in Turda, the Google listing for “Sticlă Turda” still shows as operating, rated 3.4 from seventeen reviews.

Somvetra Gherla was founded in 1975, specialising in hand-worked household glassware. Over 90% of its output went for export: Germany, Japan, the United States, Canada, Switzerland, France.

For years it held first place in the Romanian glass industry and was described as the most modern factory of its kind in the country. What was made by hand at Gherla was sold almost entirely in the West.

In 1996, 40% of the shares were bought at auction for ten billion lei by Vasile Anton, representing the businessman Corneliu Petreanu. The new owner did not pay his debts and the company returned to AVAS. In 2004 it was sold again, to the firm Feromat.

In 2003 it had a turnover of 4.6 million dollars and a thousand employees.

Today it appears on the map as “EX Somvetra”, marked permanently closed. The prefix is all the epitaph that was needed.

The first time we searched the wrong name: it is Lucsil, not Luxil. The second time we got it worse — we read a figure correctly and drew the wrong conclusion from it.

Public company data shows Sticla Lucsil SA, Cluj-Napoca, registered in 1991, today engaged in the renting and subletting of real estate, its original activity of manufacturing glass articles having been changed.

We wrote that 1991 means after the Revolution, so this cannot be a socialist factory that shut. That is false, and a reader pointed it out. The year in the companies register is the date the state unit was registered as a commercial company, not the date the works began. Socialist enterprises were converted into commercial companies almost wholesale in 1990–1991; the State Property Fund, created in 1992 precisely to privatise state commercial companies, then took up the wave.

The real sequence, as corrected for us, is the ordinary one for Romanian industry: a socialist factory, converted into a commercial company in the early nineties, privatised, and later moved into property. It is not the story of a new firm changing direction. It is a closure, with the buildings left standing and put to another use.

The Lucsil details themselves stay as they were given to us: we could not retrieve them ourselves in two search engines and three company registers. If you have the registration number or a register page, it goes up with a source.

We record the error here because it generalises: on any old Romanian company, the year in the register is an administrative date, not an industrial one. We will treat it that way from now on.

We queried the map for “fabrică de sticlă Cluj”, “atelier sticlă Cluj-Napoca”, “sticlărie Cluj-Napoca”, “vitralii Cluj-Napoca”, “glass studio Cluj-Napoca” and “prelucrare sticlă Cluj”.

Fourteen distinct businesses. All fourteen work flat glass: windows and mirrors, toughened glass, double glazing. Not one is an art-glass studio.

The categories Google assigns say it plainly: “glassware shop”, “window repair workshop”, “fabricator and seller”.

And the largest manufacturer on the list, Modern Glass Art, with 147 reviews, is not even in Cluj-Napoca — it is in Gilău.

One thing from this industry is still called what it was called then, and still runs every week.

Asociația Club Sportiv Sticla Arieșul Turda, founded in 1922 — a year after the factory — plays today in Liga IV Cluj. In the 1960–61 season it won the Romanian Cup against Rapid București, and remains the only club in history to have won the Cup without ever having played in the first division.

The factory has seventeen reviews. The team that carries its name has a Romanian Cup.