Marginea Black Pottery Workshop

The territory of Romania has been inhabited continuously for several thousand years, and remnants of pottery in various shapes and colors, adorned with simple to very complex ornaments prove the existence of rich prehistoric cultures.

The Marginea Black Pottery, famous worldwide, is shaped by hand by the craftsmen, fired and then polished, also by hand. The black color of the vessels is due to the firing process. This one is carried out according to an ancient technique, transmitted from generation to generation, the secrets of which have never left Marginea.

Marginea Black Pottery – traditional ornamentation

The Romanian traditional ornamentation still preserves sacred solar symbols in both popular architecture and national costumes. The cosmogonic outlook was based on the Trinity: the Sky, as the divine creative element (the Holy Sky), the Sun (the fire) as the material factor, and the Moon, as the spiritual factor/the Earth/the Water, both considered generative elements. The symbolic pattern that appears as ornamentation preserves directions and angles that are identical with those of the solstice and equinox. These pre-Christian symbols, discovered on prehistoric ceramics, serve to adorn today the stamp devices.