Romania's Village of Crafts in Comana brings old trades back to life

Can you build a village with EUR 210,000? Apparently you now can, as Dana and Ion Georgescu from the Paper Mill Association demonstrate with their small “village” of SMEs. The Village of Crafts in Comana, Giurgiu county, is a group of seven workshops gathering in the same place some of Romania’s traditional crafts with a clear aim of reviving them and bringing them back to our daily lives.

Natalia Martian

The space will have both a component of production and sales, but also an educational one and will be open for visiting starting May 7. It will host demonstrations and craft seminars for children and adults. As Ion Georgescu puts it, the village will be “the only place in Romania where you can find crafts together, alive and open for visitation”.

The project is financed with the help of Innovation Norway through the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2009-2014, within the scope of Green Industry Innovation funding – Romania, supporting projects with positive environmental impact. The NGO received through this funding EUR 198,000 and brought their own funds of EUR 19,990.

The funds allow for the costs of construction works and includes registration and administrative costs to date and rent costs over five years for the seven workshops. Each workhouse will be an SME in its own and will have a “head-craftsman”, who will also be the owner of the business, and a helper. Administrative costs will largely be covered through the financing also, with the businesses paying a token subscription starting May, once the funding period is over.

The seven manufactories will demonstrate the crafts of carpentry, blacksmith, pottery, plaiting of rushes, bakery, kitchen and weaving and will be open for visits starting May 7, each Saturday and Sunday between 11 and 19:30.

Growing with the aid of local community

The project is bound to be a great boost to the already flourishing local community, which includes several tourist attractions, and the Georgescu spouses hope for their village to enter the circuit. The immediate and close community has been involved in the process from the beginning, with construction works involving mainly people from Comana and close by, while workshop owners have also been recruited from Comana and nearing localities.

The construction materials are also locally obtained, with wood coming from the nearing forest, adobes made out of soil from their back yard and reeds from the nearing mini-delta. The houses will have a traditional feeling to them, with the plastering made with lime and mortar and support beams made of tree trunks, but they will also have the latest, state of the art electricity works, for obvious safety reasons.

“The whole concept of the village is not to remain in the 19th century with our crafts, to bring them into the 21st century. For example, we worked with acacia poles, which is an old technique, but the foundation is 100 percent from the 21st century.” It’s once more about safety, as Comana is in a seismic zone, Ion Georgescu explains.

About safety and about permits. “In Romania it’s hard to get permits. It is a problem we raise from time to time, because you cannot do things anywise. You want the taste of slow food? You cannot do it on the induction hob, you must to do it on the fire with wood or a wood-fired cauldron. But you’re not allowed to, because it’s outdoors, it’s uncontrolled environment. So we had to match requirements to obtain authorization,” Georgescu says.

How will the village sustain itself once the funding period ends?

There will be three main income sources, Georgescu explains: visiting fares, workshop fares and sales. Production will be aimed mainly at the local community, but once the craftsmen gather experience and the absorption capacity will be surpassed locally, products will be put up for sale for visitors of the village.

“We obviously do not exclude partnerships in the form of sponsorship. For example, we can approach companies to co-finance workshops, to offer free workshops for certain categories of children, or to reduce costs for specific workshops for a number of children,” the project initiators says.

Children will be one of the main publics for the workshops, but families and tourists coming to Comana are also welcome. The seminars will be held by the Georgescu spouses, who are trained to deliver specialized courses in manual weaving, ceramics modelling / pottery and rush weaving.

The workshops are built in the "old-fashioned" way

The first adobe being made

An adobe wall from the village

A collection of heart-shaped stones that went into the floors of the workshops

The demonstrations stand from the Fair of traditional products from the farm and rural households

A loom used for demonstration

Manual sewing

Reed weaving

The making of manual paper

How difficult are Innovation Norway grants to access?

The two are multi-talented, multi-purposed people, it seems, as they are also very good at getting and managing grants. When asked how difficult it had been to obtain the Innovation Norway funding, with his characteristic smile Ion Georgescu said it wasn’t.

“We come from areas in which we work with writing and implementing projects. So it was not hard at all. Plus we worked with friends who helped us with the project writing, after which we did the implementation,” he explains.

Norway grants are among the friendliest types of grants, however, he points out, because they do not require a lot of paperwork and people you work with are generally very open, working a lot via e-mail and very quickly.

“It took four days from approval until we got the money. We received approval on e-mail and within three days we had the money in the account. That’s the Norwegian mentality: ‘As long as you do your job well, why should I hinder you?’,” Georgescu adds.

So what’s in store for the future?

Beside the day to day activity of the workshops, the Georgescu spouses already look to the future with many plans, including a possible academy or school of crafts, an outdoor amphitheater, private events, receptions and anything else that can be done within the space.

“We are not a past-ridden project, we won’t try to keep it as it once was. Because we realize that it can’t be as it was in the old days. We want to modernize, to bring crafts into the 21st century. Take, for example, the shirts we will work on in the weaving workshop. The base t-shirt is industrially made and bought, but we will improve it with handmade fabrics,” Dana Georgescu says. Our popular costume is not something you can wear on a day to day basis, Ion Georgescu adds, but that is exactly the aim of the village, to improve it and make it so that it can be worn.

And not least, among the space’s aim is to help “city folk who are tired with their day to day activities to get away and discover a great palette of crafts and activities,” they add.

For those who are curious to discover the anti-stress village, the Paper Mill Association offers a taste of the activities within the Fair of traditional products from the farm and rural households, organized by the Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences between April 28 and 30. During the three days there will be demonstrations of loom weaving and hand sewing (April 28, between 15:00 and 17:00), rush weaving (April 29, between 15:00 and 17:00) and manual paper making (April 30, between 10:00 and 12:00).

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