Medzev is a town of about four thousand people in the Kosice region of eastern Slovakia, in a narrow valley where the Bodva river runs out of the Slovak Karst. It has a square, a Catholic church, a small museum, and what may be the oldest continuously operating blacksmiths' guild in central Europe.
The guild, the Cech kovacov, was chartered in 1376 by the local lord, who needed iron tools for the mines in the hills above the town. The mines are gone. The guild remains.
It meets on Wednesday evenings at the Hammerschmiede, a sixteenth-century water-powered forge on the edge of town that now functions partly as a museum and partly as a working shop.
Jozef Hudak, the current guild master, is sixty-three. He is a third-generation blacksmith. His grandfather, his father, and now he have all served terms as master. His son, Marek, who is thirty-seven and works as an IT consultant in Kosice, will not.
"He helps," Jozef said. "On Saturdays sometimes. But he will not be master. We have agreed on this."
The guild has eleven members. The oldest is eighty-one. The youngest is twenty-nine. Of the eleven, four still earn part of their living as blacksmiths. The others have other jobs and forge in the evenings.
On the Wednesday I visited, in early May, the forge was lit at six in the evening. The coal came up slowly. The bellows, which are powered by a wheel in the Bodva, began their slow rhythmic wheeze.
The smell inside the Hammerschmiede is specific. Coal smoke, hot iron, old wood, river damp, and the faint mineral tang of scale, the flaking oxide that comes off hot steel.
The Wednesday meeting is part work, part business, part something else. The guild was making, that evening, a set of hinges for the door of the church in a neighboring village. The church was paying them two hundred and forty euros for the work, which would take about six hours of forge time across two evenings.
“The Wednesday meeting is part work, part business, part something else.”
"We do not make money on this," said a man named Tibor, who is forty-one and runs a heating-and-cooling business in his day life. "We make hinges."
The work was distributed. Jozef and Tibor took the forge. A man named Karol, who is fifty-eight and the guild's treasurer, took the anvil. Two younger members worked the bellows and tended the coal.
The first hinge came out of the fire at six-forty. It glowed orange, then yellow at the tip. Karol struck it three times, turned it on the anvil, struck it twice more, and laid it on a stone to cool.
"A hinge," he said, "is not difficult. A hinge is patient."
Around eight in the evening the guild took a break. They sat at a long wooden table at the back of the forge. A woman named Eva, who is the wife of one of the members and runs a small bakery in the town, had brought bread and a pot of beef goulash.
They ate slowly. They talked about the price of coal, which has gone up. They talked about the apprentice program the guild runs with the technical school in Kosice, which had three applicants this year, the most since 2019.
"Three is not many," Jozef said. "But three is more than one."
Medzev was, for centuries, a German-speaking town. It was settled in the thirteenth century by miners from Saxony, and until the Second World War most of its population spoke a dialect called Mantakisch. After 1945, most of the German-speakers were expelled.
The guild survived this. Its records, which Jozef keeps in a wooden box at his house, are in German until 1948 and in Slovak after.
"My grandfather wrote in German," Jozef said. "My father wrote in Slovak. I write in Slovak. It is the same guild."
After the goulash, the work resumed. The second hinge took longer. There was a flaw in the steel, a small inclusion that caused the metal to split along one edge. Karol cursed in Slovak and then, after a moment, in German.
The hinge was set aside. A new piece of stock was cut. The fire was brought back up.
By ten in the evening they had three of the six hinges done. The remaining three would be finished the following Wednesday.
Jozef walked me to the door. The square outside was quiet. A dog barked somewhere up the valley. The Bodva, which had been turning the wheel for the bellows, continued to run.
"Six hundred and fifty years," he said. "This Wednesday. Last Wednesday. Next Wednesday."
He shrugged. It was not a complicated thing, in his telling. The forge was lit. The hinges were made. The river ran.
