Pottery-making at Potravlje nr. Sinj in Dalmatia, Croatia 1990 & 1994 - RJC film2 скачать в хорошем качестве

Pottery-making at Potravlje nr. Sinj in Dalmatia, Croatia 1990 & 1994 - RJC film2

Potravlje lies on the edge of a seasonally dry valley, or polje, just north-west of Sinj and about forty minutes drive from Split on the central Dalmatian plateau. The village is a dispersed settlement formed from numerous small hamlets surrounded by farmland which produces mixed crops of cereals, vegetables and fruit, including grapes. Upland pasture is available in the mountains of the Dinaric Alps which descend to the village on its north-west side, while resources of coal and clay were available in the polje before it was flooded for the Perucka reservoir. The potters Jure and Dusan Knezevic, from the small hamlet of Knezevici, were filmed there in 1990 and 1994, just before and towards the end of the 1991-5 war in Croatia, during which period the village was occupied for several years by forces of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina. While some damage to buildings occurred during this period, and one potter was killed when he returned too early, the level of occupation was not intense and one of the potters even returned to find unfired pots he had left to dry several years earlier. Privations caused by war partly explain the return to barter economy shown towards the end of the film. While up to five potters worked there until the war only Jure and Dusan continued afterwards, with Dusan continuing until at least 2018 along with Jure’s two sons, who are both based in Sinj but travel to their home village to fire their pots. The tradition of manufacture has remained broadly constant since the potters here were first filed in the 1930s, with hand-wheels used to form pots made from local clays tempered with a mixture of calcite and sand and fired on open fires. While cooking pots for use on open fires or modern ovens still find discerning buyers, there is greater demand for the portable bread-ovens used to cook meat or bread, the majority of which are sold at annual fairs in places as far apart as Nin, near Zadar and Western Herzegovina.