A luxury watch designed by an Albanian jeweller Pirro Ruco is turning heads. Ruco’s masterpiece is set to compete with the best of its kind at the Geneva Watchmaking Grand Prix slated to take place in November. The watch’s design pays homage to Albania.
The timepiece it is set under a sapphire dome with the hours marked by 12 golden folk dancers set on Murano glass. The minute and hour hands are adorned with eagle talons — Albania’s national symbol. Ruco’s rollercoaster rise mirrors that of Albania.
The country has gone from poverty and isolation as the most closed communist regime in Europe to rollicking capitalism. Along the way, the jeweller overcame jealousy, the secret police and being sent into exile to rise to the pinnacle of his profession. How did Ruco’s journey begin? The jeweller’s journey began in 1985 when he was asked to make a medal in red and gold bearing the head of Enver Hoxha, the paranoid dictator who ruled the small Balkan nation with an iron fist for more than four decades.
“That saved me,” he told AFP from his workshop tucked away in an alley in the capital Tirana. The medals were awarded to the regime’s most loyal supporters and later caught the eye of Hoxha’s wife. The turn of fortune saw thousands more produced and worn by communist cadres across Albania.
“All the congressional delegates had to wear it. I made a name for myself with it,” he said. It also saved him from the textile mills where he had been sent because his fam.