Svi lički lončari
All Potters of Lika

Summary/Abstract: As an important branch of rural economy, pottery had an outstanding role in the peasant life throughout the world. In the past centuries it was produced in many villages of Croatia, in some of which potters work till today. There are two different ways of pottery-making in Croatia, called mainly after the kind of potters wheel in use — the hand-wheel and the foot-wheel pottery. In places where there were sources of good quality clay for the production of pottery (what usually meant that the soil was not very suitable for agriculture), many people produced pots and sold them to nearer or farther customers, thus forming centers of pottery production. This paper tries to display the evidence of the existence of these centers in Lika, observing some written sources and museum specimen. The oldest document in which potters of Lika were mentioned, is a questionnaire about the peasant life in Croatia from 1850. Other evidence are the catalogs of the exhibitions of national economy from the end of the 19th century, where names of certain potters from Lika were listed. Ethnographical researches reveal that at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century the most important center of pottery production was Kaluderovac, but pottery was also produced in several other villages of the region— in Kosinj, Klanac, Rastoka, Sinac, Kompolje... Production consisted of pots and kettles used for cooking on the open fire, bell-shaped lids under which bread was baked, pots for the storage of food or liquids, recipients used in the processing of milk. Pots were made usually on the small hand-wheel, with the exception of Kompolje where foot-wheel was used. Pottery was not glazed (with some exceptions) but blackened in a special process. In one description of the life in Kaluderovac, written in 1900, we can learn that all the male inhabitants of the village at that time were potters. They traded their pots to the customers in Lika, but also in the vast region around it: in western and central Bosnia, Banovina, Kordun, northern Dalmatia and Croatian primoije. Sometimes they travelled till Slavonia and Podravina, also through Slovenia up to the frontier with Austria. Little by little, as the demand for pottery was diminishing due to various reasons, so was its production. The majority of pottery centers in Lika stopped with their production round the 1950s, leaving Kaluderovac the only center of production till the 1990s. The last potter in the village, Frane Arbanas, stopped his wheel then, at the age of 84. He died five years later. Was this the end of pottery-production in Lika? Most probably yes. There still exist, though, former potters in the district, people who took other jobs seeing no perspective in pottery, many of them being now in pension. Most of them speak with nostalgia of the times when they worked as potters, and could display their knowledge to the young. Maybe in the future some way of revitalization of this traditional skill will be possible.

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