From Barcelona in 1697 to Kyiv in 2023, passing through Sarajevo in 1994, the jewels made under siege shine even brighter and question us about the uselessness of war and the usefulness of beauty… Or is it the other way around?
Small topaz teardrops embroider the bracelet.
It was made in Kyiv at the beginning of the invasion, when it seemed that the city was going to fall into Russian hands, and a Bosnian friend –Alma Masic– just bought it for me in a jewelry store on Andriivsky Uzviv street, the Montmartre of the Ukrainian capital .
Alma worked three decades ago in Bosnia with relatives of the disappeared, and now she works in the same way in Ukraine: the history of our species is well set with pain, just as my ancestors did not stop setting jewels when the armies bombarded Barcelona.
Jewelry stores are like zoos or ski slopes: in the middle of a war they are very out of place. Or what is left out of place is the world around them?
In the final leg of the siege of Sarajevo, walking through the old city, I passed a jewelry store: Fahrudin Sofi?, setters since 1927. In their window, a needle with the fleur-de-lis, the medieval symbol of Bosnia, caught my eye. I went in and asked for its price. The jeweler told me that it was not for sale, that he had created that needle at the beginning of the siege, molding the silver and selecting the stones with the artillery in the background.
His words intensified the desire to possess that needle carved between projectiles. I pulled out all my seduction power, and it worked. I took it with me, and ever since I have felt that to possess that fleur-de-lis is to possess the beauty and futility of jewels and wars.
“When you put your soul in a stone, the stone responds to you,” says the Kyiv jeweler Sofia, who made the topaz teardrop bracelet. And she, between missiles, she adds: “We still put more soul into working these precious stones, which some of our soldiers take to the front.”
What does a precious stone carved under criminal explosions tell us?
Josep Vilarrúbia –my father’s grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather– was also a jeweler and also suffered the brutal Bourbon and Austrian sieges of Barcelona –1652, 1697 and 1705– at all stages of his life: being a simple apprentice and being the highest representative of the Guild of Silversmiths. Nothing, neither the massive attacks against the city’s bastions nor the indiscriminate bombardments of the urban fabric, completely stopped his workshop.
His son inherited his name, his trade and the sieges. He suffered the final assault of 1714, probably fighting at the Santa Madrona portal with the battalion of the Gremio de Plateros. Like his father, he had suffered the sieges of 1705 and 1697, the latter being an apprentice in the family workshop.
What does it feel like for a boy to learn how to cut and set precious stones while having cannonballs thrown at him?
Two years after the French siege of 1697, Josep Vilarrúbia (junior) took the exam to be a jeweler. He did it together with other boys after six years of compulsory apprenticeship in a workshop, and with several guild masters as a jury. They had to present the drawing of a jewel – the Arxiu Històric of Barcelona preserves the fabulous drawings of five centuries of apprenticeship – and also present that same jewel already made. The aspirants used to draw her wrapped in angels, flowers or saints. This is how he did it with his ring, as his father had done before and as his grandchildren’s grandchildren would do for two centuries.
That day in 1699, the boy –Jeroni Cànoves– who was being examined just after my ancestor did not wrap his jewel, also a ring, with angels or flowers. He drew their alliance attached to a noose in the sky and floating over the siege they had suffered two years before, a French victory that briefly made the Sun King king of the Catalans. That siege caused twenty thousand deaths, and the ring hangs over burning bulwarks, bombs flying over rooftops and explosions blowing up people’s bodies.
What is the jewel in this drawing? The siege talisman? Or the most sublime of bombs?
Joan Oliveras and Pilar Vélez explained a few years ago the history of a jewel in the Civil War, a pendant from the Masriera house. He belonged to a family of Catalan industrialists, and a squad of the FAI went to his house to loot it. The mother begged that the pendant, which had strong sentimental value, not be taken away. But they killed his grandfather and his father, and they stole everything. After the war, with the family exiled in France, a militiaman sought them out to return the pendant and ask for forgiveness.
At that moment, what shone the most was not the jewel from the Masriera house.
