The Secret of the Zlakusa

In the summer dusk which silently creeps over the vicinity, the struggle persists on the blazing hearth of Milojko Nikitovic, the potter from Zlakusa. The light scrapes the darkness, and the tracking flames reveal the contours of a modest clay object. The sputter and silence substitute each other. Is it the rhythm from the heart of the soil, the hardship and joy, experience, the morals and memory inherited from the ancestors, or, as it sometimes happens, in our fantasies we see all sorts of images in fortuitous formations of shapes and shades spread by the night – the lord of the secrets.

While the simple contour is being born on the chain winch, even of the simplest flowerpot made for sale on the city market, the clay covered hands which slide along the smooth surface of the object, bring to light the oldest handicraft of man. His connection to the soil, a thousand years long, has been embraced in it. And what does the potter sell when he brings to the market a colorful family of pitchers, jugs, carafes, ewers, bowls, flasks…? He sells, as the Macedonian poet Blaze Koneski says, "the traces of his touch, a part of his and the heat of the soil, the rhythm of his pulse and breath, and the whisper of his mysterious thoughts", while he spins the wheel and meditates on shapes and colors of his objects.