Heating up: A man puts poci (teapots) into a kiln for firing.

A village in Klaten, Central Java, has developed a reputation for using an unorthodox way to produce pottery, the slanted rotation technique.

Pagerjurang, a hamlet in Melikan village, Bayat district, Klaten regency, Central Java, is known as a pottery center with 210 of its 235 families crafting and selling pottery products.

Uniquely, the craftspeople in the village apply a slanted rotation technique, by which the wheel used to turn and shape clay is in an oblique rather than horizontal position as normally found among pottery and ceramic makers worldwide.

The distinctive method was confirmed by Sukanta, a local craftsman and the village secretary of Melikan. Sukanta, who has toured various pottery and ceramic producing regions in Indonesia and visited China, maintained that the slanted technique originated in Bayat and has been practiced for centuries.

'€œEven if people in other region use the slanted rotation method, they certainly come from here [Bayat] or have been taught by natives of Bayat living in that region,'€ Sukanta said recently.

In 1992, a professor from Japan, Chitaru Kawasaki, visited Melikan. As head of the Department of Ceramics at Kyoto Seika University in Kyoto, Kawasaki wanted to see for himself how the Melikan craftspeople worked using the technique.

Then Kawasaki took two of them to Japan, where they were asked to demonstrate the slanted style of pottery crafting at a pottery and ceramics exhibition.

This system is also capable of turning out pottery items within a very short time. A relish container 7 to 10 centimeter in diameter takes less than a minute, a 20-cm rice dish around 1.5 minutes, and a pot for gudeg (jackfruit and coconut milk stew) 15 cm in width and 25 cm in height about two-and-a-half minutes.

'€œMy wife makes teapots with a daily capacity of over 140 by the same method,'€ revealed Sukanta. The other unique feature of Pagerjurang pottery-making is the predominance of female workers. Sukanta said 100 percent of the pottery makers in his village were women, with men only engaged in finishing techniques.

'€œCrafting pottery in the sloping position requires some finesse, a quality that is the characteristic of most women,'€ said Sukanta. One of those introduced by Sukanta was Siswanti, a middle-aged woman who has been making pottery for the last 10 years. She produces 100 gudeg pots daily and up to a thousand monthly.

Her husband helps her with finishes like dyeing and polishing. The total time needed to process clay into pottery ready for sale is around three to five days depending on weather conditions. '€œAt first I only worked part-time, which turned out to be fairly profitable as all products sold out,'€ said Siswanti.

Another characteristic of Melika'€™s Bayat pottery is that the products'€™ blackish-brown color after firing cannot be imitated by producers in other regions. This color appears purely from the firing process rather than glazing. '€œThe clay in this area gives rise to this effect for unknown reasons,'€ said Sukanta.

Sukanta said that several years ago a pottery maker from another region working with a big pottery business in the district returned home after several months, carrying clay on a pickup truck to be processed by the same technique learned from Pagerjurang. But the pottery produced was different, with no blackish color appearing.

'€œWe have no idea why it turned out that way. It may be that all elements in the process affect each other, involving the clay and sand used as well as the phases of production,'€ Sukanta said.

Pagerjurang pottery, therefore, continues to be buyers'€™ first choice. Local craftspeople routinely send their products to Yogyakarta, Solo, Semarang, Bandung, Malang, Jakarta and Surabaya. For foreign destinations they cooperate with major handicraft entrepreneurs who make regular deliveries to Australia and the Netherlands.

Pottery producers in Pagerjurang also frequently cooperate with craftsmen and business people in Kasongan, a pottery center in Yogyakarta, thus enabling them to expand their deliveries to other countries like Argentina, France and Belgium.

'€œThey'€™ve known us through Kasongan by word of mouth so far. We'€™re actually not yet as famous as Kasongan. For our broader foreign marketing we have to do it via Kasongan,'€ said a pottery seller in Melikan, 43-year-old Endang.

Today, Melikan has become a tourist village, with signposts along the Yogyakarta-Solo highway showing the way to the pottery producing area, where visitors can survey pottery home industries and practice the slanted pottery wheel technique, by first asking for information and guidance at the Melikan Village Hall.

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