Everyone in Santalla calls Friedrich Bramsteidl Fritz. That is where his home is, his house, where his children were born and that is where he found the forge that he had always been looking for since his father, also a ferreiro like him, stopped making horse shoes by hand, to build pieces of tractors. Same parts for same tractors.
Fritz was born in Austria, between the heat and cold of a forge, and wanted to grow up in one. He wanted to learn the trade, but he needed to do it looking at the fire without fear that the flames would take away the spark and enthusiasm that always shone in his eyes. Because Fritz does not conceive that the trade ends up subject to fashion, nor that they, the ferreiros, are now manufacturers of parts that always fit the same model of tractors. And that’s why he left Austria, because he needed to continue making unique pieces, which may be similar to each other, but will never be identical. Fritz simply wanted to continue being a ferreiro. He came to Spain with the hope of finding a forge that would allow him to continue doing his trade. Their first stop was in Orense. Then came the trip to Santalla, the last one, together forever.
The Mazonovo hammer, in Santalla de Oscos, is more than three hundred years old and was in operation throughout the 19th century until 1970, with an intermediate break of almost thirty years. The iron industry was an important source of income for Santalla, but like almost all artisanal industries, it was also on the verge of disappearing.
In 2005, the mayor of the council at that time, Marcos Niño, put his efforts into bringing the forge back to life, but beyond rehabilitating the pieces and replacing the wood that had been destroyed by the passage of time. , the mallet needed a ferreiro. And not just any ferreiro, one who executed the job well and who was willing to live in Santalla.
In reality, the Santalla deck needed someone to fall in love with that place, and that happened to Fritz from the first moment he entered Mazonovo. He tells it himself, with a voice that is a whisper, perhaps exhausted by the noise of the hammer hitting the iron, perhaps because he still looks at the fire with admiration and timidly lowers his eyelids, letting only the light and heat necessary to him. light up your blue eyes.
“I have a certain fascination with fire. What I like is to continue making handcrafted pieces and I think it is something so fundamental for human beings to work with their hands…” says Fritz, who in addition to making knockers for doors, railings for mansions and castles, screws for stoves, pans for playing, racks, pokers, horseshoes and even horns, ensures that people who come to take a mallet course achieve something very important, freeing themselves from stress by hammering. “It is something so simple and at the same time so necessary to use our hands. I suppose that’s why so many computer scientists come here, that they spend their working lives in front of a computer handling data. Here they take the hammer and work on their piece for two days. Many leave with pain in their hand or wrist, but it is the result of the effort and satisfaction of creating something yourself because it is also addictive,” he emphasizes. While the brain concentrates on hitting with a hammer, the rest is left out of the forge.
Fritz spends between six and eight hours every day hitting with the hammer while designing the pieces, and he recognizes that you have to have a certain skill to work with iron and that in reality you are always learning. At 63 years old, he still has to think, while watching the fire burn, if he dreams of retirement day and he assumes that he does, because he knows that he has achieved something that seemed impossible twenty years ago, leaving a generational replacement in the forge. “Now we work here and in another deck further up, in the council capital, and we have many orders,” he explains. Dennis Leurinn has taken over from Fritz in the forge, and today he is working on some pieces for a granary, something that they get asked for a lot, because they are unique pieces that can only be made in an artisanal forge.
He arrived as a tourist from Holland in 2009 and fell in love with Santalla. He, who had always been a sailor, chose to stay in Los Oscos. “I will never forget when Pepe de Pérez gave us half a roll of yesterday’s bread for dinner, he was the first person we met… now I know, because I have learned it here, that Asturias captivates you with its landscape and its people,” he says. , while adjusting the leather apron on his back. This sailor on land, who today is a ferrero and countryman of Santalla, explains that people come to learn from all over Spain, from Galicia, the Basque Country, Catalonia, the Canary Islands and even from Mallorca.
Fritz points out, while crossing his arms, that Gaudí was the first to import contemporary forging, moving away from traditional shapes and figures. And there are no censorships, any piece can be made in the deck as long as it is unique and original. With his black cap pulled down, which shelters and lets his Austrian curls emerge from underneath, Fritz is not afraid of the cold of the forge, even though it is open, and the water and air pass through the mill wheel and sneak between the crossbars. of wood from the hydraulic system that gives strength to the mallet, and makes it blow the air that feeds the fire in the forge.
An Austrian ferreiro had to come to take the reins of one of the most important clubs in Asturias. Here, three kilometers from the council’s capital, in Mazonovo, Fritz fulfilled the dream that he believed had been stolen from him as a child. And here the hammer continues to sound every day. The blows against the iron guarantee that Santalla’s mallet is still alive, and that Fritz’s eyes remain bluer when illuminated by the fire… like when he was a child.
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