Petrinja pottery 2022

250 years of Pottery-Making at Petrinja, Croatia
by R Carlton - 02/01/23
Matej Stanišić (b. 1936) is the last of at least six generations of his family to be involved in pottery-making at Petrinja, a small town in western Croatia some 50 km south-east of Zagreb. The first reference to his family roots in the profession date from 1802 when it is recorded that a master potter named Martin Stanišić had been training an apprentice since 1799. By that time, pottery had been practiced in Petrinja as part of an official guild system for over a generation, having been introduced in 1773 by a decree of Habsburg ruler Marie Theresa, with the first potters arriving, according to tradition, from today’s Czech Republic.
Petrinja was the only military community in the former lands of the Croatian Military Frontier where potters maintained their own separate guild, which grew rapidly after 1773. By 1778 there were 30 potters and in 1781, 56 (Golec 2001). Such an early, rapid increase led to problems of over-supply, forcing some potters to migrate to other parts of the Frontier region, or into civil Croatia-Slavonia. It also led to competition with locally-established potters such as those in Karlovac, where an order issued in 1788 prohibited foreigners from selling goods at weekly markets. Despite this, in 1850 there remained 48 registered potters, after which numbers declined slightly until the guilds were abolished in 1859 in favour of newly-established craftsmen-cooperatives.
The Petrinja industry was at its peak in the middle part of the 19th century when around 100 potters worked alongside family members assisting with clay preparation and sale. Two Petrinja streets, Lončarska cesta (‘Potters’ street’) - now Ljudevite Gaja, or Gajeva, where Matej Stanišić now lives and works - and Nova cesta (‘New Street’) were largely given over to potters. Even today, the residents of Ljudevita Gaja Street are called topars, after the German word Töpfer (‘potter’), and that part of the town where potters settled and worked retains the name, ‘Czech Village’, after the origins of the first potters 250 years ago. Their products included tablewares, milk jugs, storage pots, flower pots, bread-ovens, toy whistles and a form of enclosed, narrow-necked water or wine container called 'stucka' which has become the symbol of the Petrinja tradition (a similar form produced in Bosnia and Serbia is known by various names, most commonly 'testija').
Production methods
In 1947 Matej Stanišić completed a course at Petrinja’s craft school and developed his potting skills in his father Šandor's workshop, allowing him to pass the required professional exam. He has continued to practice ever since, but now works on an electrically-driven rather than foot-operated wheel and fires in electric kilns, rather than the domed, wood-fired kilns formerly used.
Clay is dug at depths of a metre or so in a place called Stanci, where a large clay deposit remains, but in the past potters exploited resources on their own properties near the Kupa/Kolpa river. Until 1936 - when a German mechanical pug-mill was donated to the community - clay processing was carried out by hand within individual family-based workshop enterprises. Indeed, all stages in the production process were family based, with the wives of the master potters particularly closely involved in clay and glaze preparation, although forming the pots on a foot-wheel remained an exclusively male activity.
Previously, trade was commonly carried out by exchanging pots for volumes of grain equal to those of the vessels, especially when travelling through the countryside by cart or boat. Competition between potters was avoided by agreeing areas of interest. As observed by Stanišić: "One went to Velika Gorica, another to Topusko, the third to Kostajnica, and my uncle even to Kladuša, where the main type of pots sold was petnjaci (stove-pots). My father sold in Popovača, and they had a warehouse in Henclova Street..”.
Today, pots are primarily sold in the tourism and hospitality industries. Demand from Petrinja district is currently rather low, so in order to supplement sales from home and at local fairs Matej Stanišić travels to the Saturday market at Samobor, west of Zagreb, where demand is higher. His student Valentino Valent, also a native of the town and now a successful potter in his own right, makes a similar range of traditional pots, notably including stucke but with an increased focus on grog-tempered cooking pots as well as amfora and other curios for the tourist market, many destined for the Dalmatian coast.
Sources:
The above is based on an interview with the potter Mr Matej Stanišić conducted on November 15th, 2022 with additional assistance and information from Mr & Mrs Valentino Valent and historic information on the Petrinja guild system researched by the Petrinja-born historian, Mr Ivica Golec (2001).

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