Hiddensee - Faience ceramics and the long skinny

Vacation is the most beautiful time of the year, they say... on Hiddensee, working is like vacation! We from keramik-kartell.de visited friends in the artists' colony in Kloster on the long skinny (as Hiddensee is called by the locals) and let ourselves be inspired by a glass or two of sea buckthorn liqueur. One afternoon we went for a walk along the steep coast with Hiddensee's reserve manager. The swallows have chosen the north coast around the buckthorn and the horn as breeding ground. We are currently working on a new ceramic project to support the building of nests for birds. The swallows came in handy because we wanted to better understand their breeding needs. High up in the cliffs these kings of the few have their nest holes, protected from any enemy. In the steep face, however, a quite different treasure is found beside swallows: clay!

This treasure was found more or less by chance on Hiddensee around 1750 by the Swedish-Pomeranian chamber councillor Joachim Ulrich Giese. He had inherited a small trading company from his father and wanted to expand it. By finding clay on his own land, it was now to become a ceramic manufactory. In the 18th century, ceramics was an affordable alternative to Chinese porcelain and it did not take long before similar imitations were invented. One of these techniques is faience. The word is derived from the Italian town name Faenza and represents the place of origin of the (new) technique. The red or ochre/beige-colored ceramics are covered with a colored or white covering tin glaze and then bisqued. Because of this, the original clay color is almost covered. The remaining (red) shimmer was removed with a glaze bath of sand, potash, lead, tin and water and received a snow-white shard.

To give the ceramics the corresponding Asian porcelain-like look, additional motifs were painted directly onto the glaze. This was done either with sharp-fire colors (limited to blue, manganese, yellow, green, red, brown and black due to the high temperature) or with muffle colors (metal oxides mixed with finely powdered glass with a high lead and boric acid content).

Joachim Giese founded his Stralsund Faiencen Manufaktur in Tribseer Straße 24 a in 1755 and quickly became one of the largest ceramic manufacturers in the Baltic region. Giese owned the land on Hiddensee, on which he had the clay extracted. Thus, twelve employees work at the end mandrel and the Hucke to extract the clay. In the beginning, the protophysicist Bernhard Nicolaus Weigel regularly examined the composition of the clay. In Stralsund the purified clay was processed and exported to the world. Initially, two kilns were operated, later a third one was added - all three wood-fired. The faience production fed over a hundred people, because the demand for ceramics was very high at that time. In addition, faience tableware brought very good sales, because the production of porcelain was not yet very widespread. One could admire the wealth generated in the Gieses' mansion on Hiddensee. The walls of one room were completely covered with faience tiles from our own manufactory, painted with bird and butterfly motifs. For the Stralsund faience factory coincided approximately with the age of the Rococo: The love of life, mobility and playfulness of this period were also reflected in the ceramic products.
In order not to get bogged down (Giese also owned a herring salt works, a cloth factory and a bank account), Giese sold the faience factory to Johann Ehrenreich in 1766. Johann Ehrenreich expanded it further and employed 77 workers in 1769. He was the largest employer in Stralsund and owned the largest faience manufactory in Central, Northern and North-Eastern Europe.

This success story came to an abrupt end in 1770, when an explosion of the Kröpken Tower damaged the manufactory. The 22 surviving workers were partly paid with faience ceramics instead of money and the manufactory was forced into receivership by its creditors after several changes of ownership. In 1792 the ceramic faience manufacture came to an end and disappeared in the course of time. Today you can still admire some of the masterfully manufactured products in the local museum in Kloster and in Stralsund.
For example, a Hiddensee export product came to an untimely end and the clay was forgotten. The sea gnawed at the steep coast and the swallows made themselves at home in the sand layers in between.

We could hardly believe our luck on the beach and still on the spot we checked the condition and agree with Weigel: You can also do something with it on vacation!