Decorative ceramic vessel · Cucuteni Neolithic motifs · Wolf

Hand-built footed ceramic vessel of Neolithic inspiration made by artisans in the southern plains of Romania. Shaped freely from clay and decorated with ancestral zoomorphic motifs drawn from the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture - one of Europe's earliest painted ceramic traditions. Such vessels are thought to have stood originally at the centre of solar rites and the cult of the Great Goddess, their painted imagery closer to devotional language than to ornament. For decorative display.

The Craft. This vessel is shaped by hand, without a potter's wheel, using the traditional coil technique, through which the form is built freely, in stages, with the successive addition of clay strips, so the widest point of the vessels can hold its own weight while still soft. The process demands patience, precision, and a deep understanding of the material. Once shaped, each object comes to life through decoration; the surface is painted with ancestral symbols and colour harmonies inspired by the Cucuteni world using angobă, a clay slip diluted to a workable consistency, which is the source of the piece's chalky, matte finish. This piece showcases wolves, symbolising vigilance and protection, snakes, symbols of rebirth and protection and spirals, symbol of the eternal cycle of life and regeneration. After the paint has dried, the entire surface is burnished with smooth river stone to allow the pigment to penetrate the clay, and fired in a kiln for about ten hours.

The Heritage. Over 6,000 years ago, across a vast area of what is now parts of Romania, Moldova and Ukraine, an astonishing civilization that came to be named Cucuteni-Trypillia flourished for thousands of years before vanishing into the Bronze Age. It left behind some of the largest known Neolithic settlements in Europe, along with a body of painted ceramics unmatched elsewhere on the continent; the complex polychrome decorations – spirals, solar and lunar symbols, snakes, stylised human figures and crosses – were not merely aesthetic elements, but coded symbols of their beliefs, myths, and cosmic structure expressed in ritual practices of sacralisation and purification that such objects were part of. The Cucuteni-Trypillia civilization is now in the process of obtaining UNESCO World Heritage recognition.

The Maker. From their home workshop in southern Romania, Nicoleta and Ion Mitroi work with dedication towards the revival of a ceramics style lost in history. A trained engineer, Nicoleta changed course when she first encountered Cucuteni-Trypillia pottery in a museum and fell under the spell of its raw beauty and symbolic charge. Her husband Ion, a graduate of the ceramics department at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, also embraced the style and together they have been shaping, now for decades, every piece without a wheel, working either as faithful replicas of excavated vessels or as personal interpretations of the same visual language. Beyond the workshop, they run demonstration classes, summer workshops, and traditional-craft circles in museums and schools, making the Cucuteni-Trypillia and Gumelnița heritage visible to a wider public.