On Saturday I visited a Filigree “factory” in Prizren, Kosovo.  The “factory” was actually a school room being used by a collection of former factory workers.  Their factory is one of the recent state-owned assets that have been privatized.  The person who bought it, locked the doors and shut down the factory.  The remaining workers went from having hundreds of kilos of silver to work with to only 3 kilos.  They lost all their tools, all their projects, and their jobs.  Now they work from a school room with what tools they can buy.  They work basically for free, putting the vast majority of the money they make on the items sold back into buying more silver.  More pictures of them and their work below.

More pictures of their work are available in my Flickr Set.