The TORBADJA Story

 

Torba Dja first appeared about twenty-five years ago as a nickname I used to sign up on websites and in games. Without digging into semantics or symbolism, the name meant roughly this: “a bag of good cheer,” “a sack of laughter.”

I’d been interested in knife making since school. I had a small workshop in a shed, with an electric grinder and a few hand tools. Back then there was almost no information on the subject in our country. It only began to appear about ten years later, with the arrival of the internet. In fact, knife making was a taboo subject even in Soviet times. My work from that period was, without exaggeration, terrible from every angle: zero knowledge of materials science and heat treatment, no sense of form or ergonomics, and questionable fit and finish. Any one of those knives could have served as a perfect example of how not to make a knife. But it was precisely those early efforts that later fueled an obsessive hunger for information and the gradual build-up of technical skills.

After we moved into our own house, I set up a better workshop and a small forge in the yard. Knife making gave me a broad base of skills. Besides metalwork (bench work, heat treatment, welding, soldering), I had to learn to work with wood, polymers, bone, and leather, along with the chemical compounds used with these materials, and so on. I didn’t use these skills only for making blades. I also carved small wooden jewelry, hair clips, smoking pipes… Our Work

So when my craft reached a point where I was no longer ashamed of it, I decided to sign my work with the name I was known by on various specialist forums: Torba Dja.

As a matter of fact, there was more to those years than craft. There were several other projects under this name that are worth mentioning. Back in my home village, the name Torba Dja meant more than my real name 😊 On social media (at the time, the network VKontakte), most of the villagers knew me by that nickname.

It started with building a children’s playground on a vacant lot next to our house. The construction involved considerably more children than can be seen in the photographs presented here. There were also many more photographs of the construction than you see here. Unfortunately, I currently have access to only part of that photo archive. I’ll say this up front: we built it entirely with our own hands, with no hired labor. Through social media, I managed to interest civic-minded young people. Children and some adults joined in. Construction took almost the whole summer, stage by stage. None of us knew much about it, but we made up for our lack of experience with initiative 😊

The playground was followed by a summer event called “Wet Wars” (Mokri Viiny). On hot days, when the temperature went above 30 °C (86 °F), I organized a party for the village’s children and young people. Alina helped me, along with a friend who handled the music, and handled it well. We printed announcements in advance and delivered them around the village. The day before the event, we brought containers holding 1–2 cubic meters of water (roughly 260–530 gallons) to the playground. We also arranged with a local farmer to bring a ten-cubic-meter tank of warm water (about 2,600 gallons). We hooked a motor pump and a fire hose to the tank, and invited firefighters from the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, who arrived at the height of the event and sprayed everyone down.

Anyone who wanted to join in, children and adults alike, showed up with water pistols, squirt guns, or just plastic bottles, ready to drench each other to their hearts’ content.

Needless to say, the children looked forward to every one of these parties. And how many times, after one ended, did they ask: “When is the next episode?” 😊

Over three or four years, if I remember correctly, we held five such episodes (“Wet Wars: Episode 1, 2…”).  “Wet Wars”

Alina supported me in these community projects, just as she did in my creative ones. Where my talent runs into negative numbers (I can’t draw at all, for instance, and sadly that is not an exaggeration but an understatement), she did part of the work. When I needed to emboss the leather of a knife sheath, for example, she took on the task. It was most likely at this stage that Torba Dja became more than a nickname and a maker’s signature. It turned into a shared project: TORBADJA.

Later, Alina began developing her own line of creative work. With a gift for drawing and plenty of patience, she started making miniatures: scrimshaw, which is something like tattooing, but on bone. It is a demanding process that takes many hours. The whole piece is done under high magnification, through special magnifying glasses or a microscope, and it requires attention and concentration. Our skills complemented each other well. I prepared the bone (deer antler, mammoth tusk, long bone) and made the stand for the finished piece, while my wife did the scrimshaw itself.

I no longer remember how the idea of opening an Etsy shop came about. But my wife took on all the technical work of setting it up, and she handled communication with customers. I made the products and took the photos for the listings.

Since we prepared the wood for our wooden pieces ourselves, we eventually had a surplus, and beautiful timber became one of the product categories we sold.

Alina’s attentiveness and capacity for work, together with my near-obsessive perfectionism, paid off. Regular customers appeared, the shop’s rating was high, and the TORBADJA project kept growing steadily…

February 2022 and a New Stage

February 2022. Missiles flying over the house at six in the morning tell you instantly, with absolute finality (at least, this is true for me), that your life has been split into a Before, to which there will never be a return, and an unknown After.

Our village, in southern Ukraine, lies about 19 miles (30 km) from Enerhodar, home to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe. It was occupied on the second day of the full-scale Russian invasion. What I remember most from the first days is the columns of military vehicles under our windows, 50 to 150 units at a time, passing every day, several times a day, throughout the first week. They would crawl along slowly or stop for the night with their engines running. In those days the village air smelled of diesel. It smelled the way it did in my childhood, when the electricity went out and my grandfather lit a kerosene lamp in the room.

Life under occupation in those days is hard to put into words. In short, your brain refuses to accept reality because it is so savage in its essence that it seems impossible. Your general state is one in which, from chronic stress, you have more cortisol in your blood than blood itself, with all the consequences that follow.

At the end of April, friends suggested an improvised evacuation. So we took with us: our two old pit bulls, Dark and Dora (both eleven years old), two sports bags of clothes to get us through the first days, and a laptop with no battery, so that nobody would take any interest in it.

Instead of the planned 100 km (62 miles) to Zaporizhzhia, the journey took 300 km (186 miles), because we had to take a detour. We left early in the morning and arrived late in the evening, passing about 30 Russian checkpoints along the way. We were lucky: later, people in convoys could spend weeks waiting at checkpoints for permission to move on.

A couple of days later, after leaving our car in Zaporizhzhia, we took the train to Uzhhorod and rented a place in its suburbs.

This is where the TORBADJA project changed direction. Our money, of which there was little, was running out. We had no belongings at all; we were starting life over. All our tools and materials had stayed at home, and so had the finished pieces. But we still had our “frozen” Etsy shop, we had experience, and we knew how to work with our hands. Alina analyzed the market, we talked through our options together, and we decided to switch the shop’s focus to selling ceramics.

To say it was hard is to say nothing. We put all the money we had into inventory, and all our free time into studying the new subject. The housing we could afford to rent was barely fit to live in, but it was cheap. Our two dogs, both of retirement age, were constantly sick, and vet bills were a separate line in the budget during that period. But we were in free Ukraine, not under occupation, so all of this seemed like small stuff. We had something to compare it with.

About a year and a half went by like that, and gradually our project began to come to life… New customers appeared. At first they were people who, we suspect, had no real need for ceramics at all. By buying from us, they were trying to support us, and we are very grateful to them (and I’m sure there are still such people among our customers today).

In our new place I was cut off from my tools. At first this really got to me, because at home I could do almost any job, since I’m good with my hands and had the means to do it. Now I had no hammer and no screwdriver, let alone anything more serious. But when I analyzed my state, I came to a realization: during that period I was psychologically avoiding getting tools. I used to invest both money and soul in them. After the evacuation I understood that the only things of real value are those you can physically hold in your hands and carry with you as you move on.

In the beginning, we often received ceramics by mail that had been damaged in transit. If we refused the parcel, the carrier could sometimes compensate the sender for the damaged item, but not always. And some of the people we bought from were rather special. It might be a family moving away from a front-line area and selling belongings they couldn’t take with them, or a grandmother who had decided to sell several pots that had been kept on the farm for many years. She hadn’t managed to pack them well, and I hadn’t yet developed packing guidelines for sellers. So, for example, three pots would arrive, and one of them would be broken or cracked. We could send it back and lose nothing, but the grandmother would end up out of pocket for the shipping both ways. So in most such cases, we kept the item.

In general, repairing village ceramics was quite common in Ukraine. I suspect this practice arose out of hardship rather than prosperity, but it also shows how carefully our ancestors looked after their belongings. You can read more about traditional methods of repairing ceramic vessels and modern approaches to their restoration on the page Restoration of Historical Ceramic Vessels.  Through experiments, I managed to develop a restoration technique that keeps cracks barely noticeable, the way they look when a vessel cracks but people keep using it for a long time. We described the defect honestly and put such pieces up for sale. A vessel bearing traces of such restoration gained a new chapter in its story.

But some pieces were broken or cracked in two. I decided to give such ceramics a new life, and I started making lamps from them. For several months I mulled the idea over, working out the technical side. And when everything was settled (or so I thought), I realized that the thought of buying a new tool no longer bothered me. The whole time I had been thinking the task through, I had been using a tool in my head, performing this or that operation with it in theory.

I should note that although difficulties arose at one stage of the work (it was impossible to foresee every nuance), the lamps turned out exceptionally well, and I have never come across anything like them anywhere else. I mean the technology they were made with. Since then, my tool collection has grown, and now I once again enjoy making things with my own hands from time to time.

As I write this, I have realized what that thought was, the one that later developed into the TORBADJA Ceramic Aroma System. It was a lamp I made from a hlechyk, a traditional clay milk jug. For many years the jug had been used to store milk, or dairy products. After it had been running for a few hours and the bulb had warmed its walls, a scent appeared around it. It was a scent that is hard to describe in a single word, but it stirred distant memories of childhood. It was a scent, or a note of one, that I had smelled many times as a boy, stepping into my grandparents’ storeroom. After that, I started paying more and more attention to how this or that ceramic piece smells. And eventually I decided to create a system that would help classify, by aroma, ceramic vessels that had been in long use. 

 

The Journey Continues

So it turns out that everything began with one lamp made from a milk jug, and a scent that carried me back to my grandparents’ storeroom. I had no idea then that a whole new line of work would grow out of it. I never did learn to draw, but I am learning to read ceramics with my nose 😊 Old pots keep more than cracks and patina. They keep a trace of the life in which they were used, and that trace, too, can be studied. Once upon a time, “Torba Dja” meant “a sack of laughter.” The sack turned out to be roomier than I thought. It had room for knives, for a children’s playground, for ceramics, and for a scent that carries you back to childhood. The rest of the story, like the rest of the scents, we are still collecting.