DESNA, Czech Republic — When the January issue of
National Geographic landed in his mailbox last year, Petr Pus
nearly fell to the floor. There on the cover and throughout the
issue were members of the Kayapo tribe, living far up the Amazon in
conditions more Stone Age than information age, all of them adorned
with face paint and a glittering assortment of beads.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Pus, the marketing
director for Preciosa Ornela, which
claims to be the world’s largest producer of high-end glass beads.
“They were literally wearing our beads.”
Venture up the Amazon or into a Masai Mara village in
Kenya, explore a jungle bazaar in southern India or even a roadside
shop in Arizona selling Navajo knockoffs, and the chances are
excellent that most of the beads you will see were produced in this
unlikely mountain village a stone’s throw from the Polish frontier
and a short drive to Germany.
For four and a half centuries, since Czech artisans
brought back the secrets of glassmaking from the Venetian island of
Murano, the narrow and tree-choked valleys of northern Bohemia have
been producing a dizzying array of glass beads in all manner of
colors, sizes, shapes and decorative flourishes.
A worker scooped molten glass
out of a furnace at the Preciosa Ornela glass-bead factory in
Desna.
And despite passing through history’s threshing machine
with a series of conquring rulers, including kings, emperors,
freedom fighters, Gestapo thugs and communist dictators, the
artisans are still at it.
The Preciosa factory, which produces the beads using a
mixture of traditional processes and modern industrial techniques,
remains, with 900 workers, the chief employer in this small village
of 3,000 people.
And while a flood of cheaper Chinese beads has poured
out of Asia over the last five or six years, putting many of
Bohemia’s traditional mom-and-pop beadmakers out of business,
producers of the higher-end products — known as seeds bead and made
here by Preciosa and in Japan by a few operations — are
experiencing one of their periodic bursts of prosperity.
“It’s a good job, with good pay and you get to say you
are helping to make products that are the best in the world,” said
Zdenek Gyalog, 29. He oversees the sorting department, whose
workers, in many cases, have been at Preciosa for 15 or 20 years,
and their parents before them.
“If my son, someday, comes to me and says he wants to
go into this business,” Mr. Gyalog said, “I certainly would not
oppose it.”
The Preciosa factory, which
produces beads using a mixture of traditional processes and modern
industrial techniques, employs 900 workers.
Desna became a center of Bohemian bead production a
little over 150 years ago when Josef Riedel, the descendant of
generations of glass traders and manufacturers, built a factory
astride a chattering river with the ragged Jizera Mountains looming
on all sides. Some of his original buildings are now part of the
Preciosa complex.
The Riedel family tomb dominates a steep hillside
across the road from the factory, and the white mansion of the man
once known as the glass king of the Jizera Mountains is down the
road, now a museum.
For centuries, beads and glass vessels were made here
in small workshops, or in literal cottage industries run by
families, often as a second source of income.
The houses are still easily identifiable in the
surrounding countryside, notable for their two chimneys, indicating
that a glass furnace anchored one part of the property.
Today, nearly all of those mom-and-pop operations have
fallen by the wayside, said Josef Nagy, 48, who runs a small
beadmaking operation in the village of Pencin, not far from the
Preciosa complex in Desna.
Since only Preciosa has the technology capable of
making the higher-quality seed beads, smaller manufacturers — like
Mr. Nagy’s company, Fipobex — target smaller and more specialized
markets. But the Chinese competition does not make it easy.
“Everybody is struggling,” Mr. Nagy said.
A decade ago, he had 120 employees. Now there are only
15, and much of the equipment in his aging factory sits idle. To
make up for the lost revenue, the company started giving tours,
opened a goat farm, a museum of agriculture, and a craft shop where
people can experiment with making their own beaded jewelry. “We
could see the writing on the wall,” Mr. Nagy said.
But as the smaller operations have struggled,
Preciosa’s bead factory in Desna has only flourished, as has the
town.
“As we say, beads are a cheap joy for poor people,” Mr.
Pus said, leading the way late last year across a water-slick floor
in an old, traditional furnace room.
Through eight gaping gates, workers scoop molten glass
out of red-hot pots in the brick furnace. The glowing ingots sink
with an angry hiss into wooden tubs of water large enough to
swallow an easy chair.
The seed beads that are the basis of Preciosa’s current
prosperity are more difficult to produce than ordinary glass beads
— in which molten glass is pressed into a mold — but allow artisans
a wider array of treatments, flourishes and colors.
Glass rods are melted in a furnace, then, while still
pliable, pulled through a machine that shapes them into a strawlike
tube.
The end result looks a bit like a cocktail straw,
although there are 20 sizes, each creating its own size of bead,
and 20 basic colors that can be mixed into an almost endless
selection of tones and shades, some opaque, some transparent.
The holes in the straw can be round, triangular,
star-shaped, even double-barreled, and a second color can be used
to accent the hole or create baked-in glass patterns on the bead’s
face.
Pouring beads into a rounding
machine last week. The Preciosa factory employs 900 people in a
village of just 3,000.
The glass straws are sent through a slicing machine
that bites off bead-size lengths, which are then reheated gently
and put into a spinning machine that shapes the pliable glass into
perfectly round beads that are then sorted and polished.
“And at the end of all that, all you have is one measly
glass bead,” Mr. Pus said.
Leos Adler, Preciosa’s bead production manager, set
some sample boards on a conference room table.
“Our No. 1 market at the moment is India,” he said.
Beads are used there in Hindu ceremonial garb, but also in everyday
products like the mangalsutra necklaces worn to signal that a woman
is married.
Preciosa sells directly to 70 countries and, through
regional distributors, to 40 more. In Africa, the company sells to
the Masai and Samburu tribes in Kenya and Tanzania, and to the
Zulus, Xhosas, Ndebele and other tribes of southern Africa.
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“You go to the Masai Mara and a lot of the beads you
will see in the tourist markets are cheap Chinese products,” Mr.
Adler said. “But the Masai themselves will only use our beads for
their personal use.”
In North America, the largest market is for home
hobbyists, but several Native American tribes also purchase the
beads for higher-end pieces aimed at collectors and flush
tourists.
Southern Sudan has also become a big market, Mr. Adler
said. In South America, there are ceremonial garments for religious
occasions, like childbirth ceremonies, as well as costumes for
Carnival and an assortment of belts, napkin rings and jewelry for
everyday use.
The biggest surprise of recent years was an explosion
of interest in Czech beads in Ukraine and Russia, where they were
suddenly being used to adorn religious icons and paintings.
“It has become a huge market,” Mr. Adler said. “And it
just happened.”
One place the beads are not sold in large numbers is
the Czech Republic. “I only have one thing made out of beads at home,”
said Mr. Gyalog, the Preciosa supervisor. “It’s a bracelet.”
Katerina Hruskova, assistant chief curator at the
Museum of Glass and Jewelry in the nearby city of Jablonec nad
Nisou, where an exhibition of Czech beadwork since 1700 had
recently opened, said that was understandable.
“It is just a job for the people who live here,” she
said. “If you are working eight hours or more every day with beads,
you don’t really want to go home and see beads.”