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Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Filigree Jewelry

Butterfly in filigree silver.

Every year, I give away prizes to children who have accumulated the MOST SkipHWCoupons in 10 months. SkipHWCoupons are given to children who give me perfect work to mark every week. For every perfect worksheet, I give one coupon. 

The children are allowed to hand up these SkipHWCoupons in lieu of HW, or they can choose to accumulate their coupons for the grand prize at the end of the year. 

I will confiscate and destroy 2 coupons for every piece of sloppy HW done too. Sloppy HW is detrimental to learning. Do enough sloppy and mindless work and your brain learns exactly that. Then, when you go into the exam, your sloppy habits come through in carelessness. For this reason, I prefer that children skip homework if they are tired, ill or do not feel like doing work.

Children who accumulate enough SkipHWCoupons throughout 10 months, to get the grand prize, really deserve a good reward for having focused PROPERLY on each piece of work done for me over a period of weeks and months. For this reason, I put a lot of effort into shopping for these gifts. This year, I sourced them via friends travelling in Denmark and Japan. Finally, I found the gifts in a shop situated opposite the mausoleum (a HUGE tomb) of the Emperor Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus. I found butterflies in filigree silver.

If you stand at the door of the shop and look out, you see the view below...

Behind the pillars and the tower, there is an angular building, which was the Emperor Diocletian's mausoleum. This courtyard is the Peristyle. It was where the Emperor came to wave to the public. The Diocletian Palace is a very distinctive Roman ruin in that after the Emperor died, people came into his home and built their own smaller homes within the compound. Till today, there is a warren of streets, small apartments and large palatial houses, dating from the Middle Ages (16th and 17th century) where people actually STILL live.

In Roman times, the peristyle looked like this. The shop is in that small little arch in the middle right corner.


Filigree work originated in Egyptian times and the techniques were perfected by the Etruscans and the Greeks. Master filigree jeweler Viktor Civljak owns the shop. He came to Split in 1967, from Kosovo. Filigree techniques arrived in Kosovo in the 15th century. The region had historically come under the Byzantine empire. To this day, some of the designs in Viktor Civljak's shop are reminiscent of Byzantine Orthodox Christian art.

To see how Viktor Civljak makes his jewelry, click HERE.







2 comments:

Tricia said...

Thank you for linking to my piece about how Croatian filigree jewelry is made! Coincidentally, my husband and I are back in Split right now. The city feels much like a second home to us. How much longer will you be traveling in Croatia?

Petunia Lee said...

Hi Tricia, we have left Split and are now in Plitvice.