In the villages in the south of Dolj county, the blacksmith's craft was practiced quite intensively among the Roma community.
In the Negoi commune, I spoke with the 73-year-old blacksmith Milut Constantin. He learned the trade as a small child from his father, Bunoi Antonie. During communism, he worked for 14 years at CAP (Agricultural Production Cooperative) and 26 years at SMT (Machine and Tractor Station). In Negoi, there were 14 blacksmiths who worked at CAP where there were 5 forges, 3 being assigned to a fire. After 1990, only a few of them continued to practice this craft.
No blacksmith in Negoi marked his products with a characteristic mark, everyone knew his work by the way of work (work), by the way they hammered the iron. Milut Constantin remembers that his father was a very skilled craftsman and appreciated by the people of the village. Together they also did more complicated work such as cart ironwork. Making certain pieces required a special technique that his father knew very well, namely "boiling" soldering, a process of joining two pieces of hot iron. Now he uses the welding machine.
When he had work to do, he worked from morning to night, including Sundays, and never refused a job, whether it was something to repair or a tool to make. The forge used coal before, now it uses laurel, beech or ash wood. He tempers the iron in water, then checks the tempering quality with the file (for a good tempering, the file should not catch on the object, it should slide). Most of the tools he inherited from his father.
At the smithy, he used as helpers apprentices from the villages in the area (Rast, Poiana Mare) who stayed for around 3 years and whom he taught the trade. The apprentices were children between the ages of 14 and 18. They were not paid. If they were workers and did a good job, he would buy them a suit of clothes.
He mostly worked on horseshoes that he made from iron bars. Horseshoes lasted around 1-3 months depending on how used the horse was. For horseshoes he uses: horseshoe pliers, knives, knife, hammer and file, and the whole operation of changing horseshoes was done at the gate, in front of the yard.
Before he made a good living from this job, accepting products instead of money, now he ended up not even shoeing a horse a week.
He has been married for 54 years to Milut Maria (69). He passed the trade on to his only son, but unfortunately he died in a car accident at the age of 51.
Meșterul fierar Miluț Constantin în atelierul său din comuna Negoi
