Katarína Hallonová
Wire craft is one of the youngest and, in the same breath, most known Slovak crafts. Providing additional income and concerned with repairs of kitchenware and house-to-house sales, it first emerged as men’s occupation, requiring certain amount of travel. Its beginnings probably date back to early 18th century, as there was an acute need to tackle catastrophic poverty and desperate social conditions faced by the population in economically most backward mountain regions in the North-western parts of the Trenčín County and, later on, in the Northern Spiš. Having a complicated historical development, wire craft gradually achieved unique forms, developing outstanding inner, as well as outer, organisation and material forms. It became a rather distinct economic, historical, ethnographic, social, sociological and cultural phenomenon, many a time controversial and one that, over a quarter of a century, not only influenced, both in a positive and negative way, destinies of the folks living or coming from these regions, but one that also formed an environment in which these folks lived and worked, including that outside our lands.