Crafts, mainly tapestry weaving, is an old Kuksi tradition that women and girls are handing down from generation to generation.

The Shkodra Regional Directorate of Cultural Heritage cites the example of the 70-year-old Hate Ora from Kuksi, who is one of the few prominent artisan women who has managed to keep alive the tradition of the artisanal production of carpets and tapestries.

Hate, an agile and smart woman, has been nurturing the same passion for this craft for 40 years.

She says that she has embraced the profession of craftsman since she was a child, from her great-grandmother and aunts to see them preparing the dowry even though she dreamed of becoming an architect.

Despite the difficulties of the time, together with other women artisans, she managed to preserve the tradition.

For 12 years in a row, Hate would stand out as a master in the Artistic Enterprise of Kuksi, in the 80s, among the 1200 women and girls engaged at that time in the production of tapestries in Vega, which were exported to well-known European markets.

In the 90s, with the closure of the Handicraft Enterprise, Hate would open her workshop “Artizanale Ora”, where she would cultivate this tradition by supporting two other women and at the same time offering training courses for those who want to preserve the Kuksi tradition.

The orders she receives are tapestries and carpets for which she manages to weave and unravel quickly and accurately difficult patterns with geometric figures and ethnographic motifs from the Kuksi area and beyond, which she realizes with admirable precision in sketching of a paper in millimeters by squaring in detail the joints of the work, where a square coincides with a joint. The materials she uses are thin threads of colorfully dyed wool and Radomira cotton.

Hate bequeathed the craft to her daughter, Mikaela, and her granddaughters, who work together to carry out various custom works all over the world, as a bequest to inherit the tapestry, one of the unique and irreplaceable elements it carries the passion of Kuksi women.

/a.s./