news

       Travel to the Amazon or the villages of the Maasai Mara in Kenya, explore the bazaars in the jungles of southern India, or even the roadside shops in Arizona selling Navajo replicas, where most of the beads you see are likely to be made on an unusual hill. the village is just a stone’s throw from the Polish border and a short drive from Germany.
       For four and a half centuries, since Czech craftsmen brought the secrets of glass making from the Venetian island of Murano, the narrow wooded valleys of northern Bohemia have produced magnificent glass beads in a variety of colors, sizes and shapes. Shapes and decorative patterns.
       Despite the historical grind and a succession of conquerors, including kings, emperors, freedom fighters, Gestapo thugs and communist dictators, the craftsmen survived.
       The Preciosa factory produces beads combining traditional craftsmanship and modern industrial technology. With 900 workers, it is the main employer in this small village of just 3,000 people.
       While a flood of cheap Chinese beads has flowed out of Asia over the past five to six years, putting many traditional family-owned bead makers in Bohemia out of business, manufacturers of high-quality products (called seed beads and artificial beads) including Preciosa and some factories in Japan are experiencing one from cyclical booms.
       “It’s a good job, it pays well, and you can say you’re helping to produce the best product in the world,” says Zdenek Gjalog, 29, who oversees the sorting department. In many cases, the workers in this sector are their employees. parents who have worked at Preciosa for 15 or 20 years.
       “If my son came to me one day and said he wanted to get into this industry,” Jalog said, “I certainly wouldn’t mind.”
       More than 150 years ago, Josef Riedel, a descendant of several generations of glass merchants and manufacturers, built a factory on the banks of a fast river and surrounded by the rugged Jizera Mountains) and became the center of bohemian bead production. Some of its first buildings are now part of the Preciosa complex.
       The Riddle family graves are on a steep hill across the road from the factory, and just down the road is the white mansion of the man once known as the Glass King of the Jizera Mountains, now a museum.
       For centuries, beads and glassware were made in small workshops or family cottage industries, often as a second source of income.
       The houses are still easily recognizable from the surrounding countryside and are notable for their two chimneys, indicating that a glass furnace was attached to part of the site.
       Josef Nagy, 48, owner of a small bead factory in the village of Pencin, near the Preciosa complex in Desna, says that these days almost all of these family-run shops have faded into the background.
       Since only Preciosa has the technology to produce higher quality beads, smaller manufacturers such as Mr Nagy’s company Fipobex are targeting smaller and more specialized markets. But competition in China is not easy.
       Ten years ago it had 120 employees. Now there are only 15 people left there, and much of the equipment in its aging plant sits idle. To make up for lost income, the company began offering tours, opened a goat farm, an agricultural museum and a craft shop where people could try their hand at making their own beaded jewelry. “We see the writing on the wall,” Mr Najib said.
       But while small businesses struggled, the Preciosa bead factory in Desna prospered, as did the city.
       ”As we say, beads are a poor man’s cheap treat,” Mr. Poot said late last year as he made his way through the polished floors of an old traditional kiln.
       Workers pass through eight open doors, pouring molten glass from red-hot pots into a brick kiln. The glowing gold bar sank with an angry hiss into a barrel large enough to swallow an upholstered chair.
       The beads that are at the heart of the current Preciosa boom are more difficult to produce than regular glass beads (molten glass is pressed into molds), but they provide craftsmen with a wider range of treatments, decorations and colors.
       The glass rod is melted in a furnace and then, while still flexible, put through a machine to shape it into a tube, like a straw.
       The end result looks a bit like a cocktail straw, albeit in 20 sizes, each with its own bead size, and 20 base colors that can be mixed into an almost endless selection of shades and tints, both opaque and clear.
       The holes in the straw can be round, triangular, star-shaped or even double-sided, and a second color can be used to highlight the holes or create a baked glass pattern on the surface of the bead.
       The glass straw is passed through a microtome, cut into bead-sized pieces, and then carefully heated and placed in a spinning machine, which forms the flexible glass into perfectly round beads, which are then sorted and polished.
       “Our number one market right now is India,” he said. Beads are not only used in Hindu ritual clothing but also in everyday items such as mangalsutra necklaces to indicate that a woman is married.
       Preciosa sells products directly to 70 countries and through regional distributors in a further 40 countries. In Africa, the company sells products to the Maasai and Samburu tribes in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele and other tribes in southern Africa.
       ”You go to the Maasai Mara and a lot of the beads you see in the tourist markets are cheap Chinese products,” Mr Adler said. “But the Maasai themselves use our rosaries only for personal purposes.”
       In North America, the largest market is for DIYers, but some Native American tribes also buy beads as high-quality products intended for collectors and wealthy tourists.
       Mr Adler said southern Sudan had also become a big market. In South America, there are ceremonial costumes for religious occasions, such as the birth of a child, and costumes for carnival, as well as a variety of belts, napkin rings and jewelry for everyday use.
       The biggest surprise of recent years has been the surge of interest in Czech beads in Ukraine and Russia, where they suddenly began to be used to decorate religious icons and paintings.
       The Czech Republic is one of the places where these beads are not sold in large quantities. “I only have one beaded piece in my house,” said Mr. Jarlog, the Preciosa director. “This is a bracelet.”
       This is understandable, says Katerina Hruskova, deputy director of the Museum of Glass and Jewelry in the nearby town of Jablonec nad Nisu. The museum recently hosted an exhibition of Czech beadwork dating back to 1700.
       “It’s just a job for the people who live here,” she said. “If you’re working with beads for eight or more hours a day, you really don’t want to come home and see beads.”