In an era in which the production process has been completely separated from its management and in which everyone is delivering a small segment of the complete job, craft production has managed to claim a completely new set of values. Accordingly, the craftsman or maker needs to be skilled to control the entire production process, understand each of its segments, to know how to handle very diverse and complicated operations and eventually – to constantly advance his or her craft.

True craftsmen in European village communities, including the Balkans, were blacksmiths and millers – the people who were actually working full time on their craft, and thus had no time to take part in the standard village jobs related to production of food and other resources. They were something else. Involved only in their field of expertise, very often they were also on the physical margin of the society as their workshops were always built on the outskirts of settlements.

In modern times, a transition of the concept of craft onto all kinds of individual production took place. Craft has been – as both an idea and result – raised on a pedestal that had previously been reserved only for art, looking back from the Renaissance all the way to the present industrial society. It is unmistakably a result of the current moment, in which the uniqueness and negative profitability of each handmade object has become its biggest value and asset, excluding it from the neoliberal concept of an ideal product-centered world.

Craftsmen in the modern sense of the word mostly appeared in cities, where the specialization of jobs and constant exchange of goods and services was the necessary prerequisite for a functional community. All the way until the middle of 20^th century, handcrafts were the base for making utility products for everyday needs, after which they started to slowly fade away during the accelerated, post-WWII industrialization. The “extermination” of the crafts was so fundamental that only half a century later we need to invest huge efforts into the process of its revitalization.

The professionalization of crafts in the Balkans – being on the outskirts of two great empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian – came later than in the rest of Europe. Geo-political position has influenced the scope of existing crafts and the way in which final products were treated, through a combination of Balkan, Oriental and European knowledge and experience. This “cultural crossroad” position has marked the identity of local crafts in a unique way.

For this reason it is logical that in Serbia, as well as the rest of the Balkans and most other countries, traditional craft products are regarded as cultural heritage, with ongoing efforts to preserve the knowledge and technologies of various crafts that are slowly but surely being lost in practice. It is a valuable and necessary contribution to the conservation of cultural diversity, heritage and common knowledge of the entire human civilization.