Kosiv, a small town in the Hutsul region of the Carpathians, has been a center of Ukrainian pottery since the 18th century, reaching what's often called its golden age in the mid-19th century. The tradition — known as Kosiv painted ceramics — was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2019, recognition of a craft that's still actively practiced today rather than a museum piece.
How Kosiv Ceramics Are Made
The process starts with local grey clay, coated in a thin layer of white clay slip. Once that layer dries, the outline of the design is scratched into it with a metal stylus — a technique called ryttia. Those incised lines aren't decorative on their own; they're channels that keep the colors from bleeding into one another during firing. The scratched areas are then filled with colored engobe, traditionally green, yellow, and brown, before the piece is fired and glazed. Green pigment in particular tends to spread slightly as it fires, into a soft, watercolor-like effect potters call "tears" — one of the tradition's small, recognizable signatures.
Oleksa Bakhmatiuk and the Kosiv School
The best-known figure in Kosiv ceramics is Oleksa Bakhmatiuk (1820–1882), who trained under master potter Ivan Baraniuk and went on to become the most celebrated representative of the Kosiv school. His work was shown in Vienna in 1873 and Lviv in 1877, and won a gold medal at the 1880 Kolomyia exhibition — recognition that helped carry the large scrolling floral style still associated with Kosiv pottery today.
Trembita Studio's Kosiv candle holders and plates are made using this same scratched-and-filled technique, visible up close in the crisp contour lines and the cross-hatched texture worked into the petals. You can browse our Kosiv ceramics collection.