The dial of Primordial Passion, a one-of-a-kind watch by the Pirro brand in Albania, is dominated by 12 tiny gold folk dancers, each a third of an inch tall. They stand atop a red and black surface of 1,500 Murano glass mosaic pieces that were positioned, one by one, by the brand’s founder, Pirro Ruco, using a new technique he called “Pirro texture golden borders.”
The 46.5-millimeter watch, priced at 1.2 million Swiss francs ($1.4 million), is powered by a movement from the Geneva specialist Agenhor, which supplies the likes of Van Cleef & Arpels and Hermès.
Introduced in June, Primordial Passion was the brand’s first watch. “We are the only watch brand producing 100 percent in Albania, apart from the Swiss movement,” Mr. Ruco, a mechanical engineer, jeweler and self-taught watchmaker, said through an interpreter during a recent interview.
His road to this point has been anything but a straight path.
“A Low-Tech Environment”
Mr. Ruco, 64, grew up in the Albanian town of Kucove, which at the time was called Stalin City. Today, Albanians know it as the site of a new NATO air base, which opened in March.
Inspired by his father, who collected and repaired everything from cameras to sunglasses, Mr. Ruco also made sunglasses — which were scarce in the communist state — using one of his father’s machines. “But they were 80 percent made by hand,” he said. “Albania was really a low-tech environment, special machines didn’t exist.”
In his 20s, Mr. Ruco did metal work in a factory and was allowed to attend mechanical engineering school at night, but not a university program. “I needed to do something to get out of this misery,” he said. “I wanted to be able to keep doing what I loved doing; working with beautiful metal objects and jewelry.”
He said he came up with the idea of making a pin with an engraved portrait of Enver Hoxha, the country’s Communist dictator, in time for a 1986 political congress. To ensure its quality, he said, he even constructed a pantograph (an instrument that makes it possible to copy an image or a plan on a different scale) in his parents’ spare room.
With a friend’s introduction to the well-connected sculptor Kristaq Rama, who in turn showed the pin to political powers, Mr. Ruco was allowed to reproduce 23,000.
He was in from the cold. “The political opinion of me changed completely because of the pin,” he said.
In 1991, after the country’s politics had started shifting after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mr. Ruco went to Greece, where he spent a couple of years working at the jewelry maker FaCad’oro, one of the largest Greek jewelry companies.
In 1995, back in Albania, he started Pirro, embracing modern production techniques by adding a C.N.C. (computer numerical control) machine in 1996 and a 3-D printer in 2010.
The company now has 50 employees, four of whom specialize in watches, at its two workshops in the Albanian capital, Tirana. Hortensa Ruco, Mr. Ruco’s wife, oversees the production — which, he said, totals 200 to 300 pieces of jewelry a month.
Alba Ruco, the couple’s elder daughter, is the company’s brand director. In addition to earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees, she has completed the Gemological Institute of America’s graduate gemologist program and worked in a sales position at De Beers in London.
“I came back to Albania when my father said he needed me, and we have now worked together for 12 years,” said Ms. Ruco, 35. “I am more on the jewelry side; he is more into engineering and mechanical machinery. We work very well together, we push each other. But to make watches wasn’t my decision, this vision is his.”
Since Primordial Passion, the company’s watch division also has debuted a 42-millimeter time-only watch in 18-karat gold (50,000 Swiss francs). It is a 10-piece limited edition, each with a one-of-a-kind dial; the first was in engraved onyx.
And in the near future, Mr. Ruco said, the company is to produce another watch, with a tourbillon, which mitigates the effects of gravity on time keeping, visible in the center of the dial.
“Really Emotional”
Petraq Papa, vice dean of the faculty of fine arts at the University of Arts in Tirana, has known Mr. Ruco for more than 15 years. He said he initially considered Mr. Ruco’s goal of entering the Primordial Passion in the 2024 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, the annual watch industry awards event, to be “utopian dreams of a modern-day Don Quixote” — but, in July, he saw the watch.
“I am really emotional about this. It is not a watch; it is art; it is sculpture,” Mr. Papa said. “The 12 dancers, around nine millimeters tall, in folk costumes from different regions of Albania. These men and women represent all of Albania, its culture and its centuries-old traditions. I could never have imagined to have all that in a single watch, where all symbols and engravings are about Albania.
“I never imagined that such a small object could have the magical power to make one so proud of your culture and country.”
Mr. Ruco himself was proud on July 22, when Prime Minister Edi Rama (a son of Kristaq Rama, the sculptor who had helped kick-start Mr. Ruco’s career) posted an image of Primordial Passion on his Instagram account, noting that the timepiece would be the first watch from Albania to compete in the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève. (The watch was not included among the finalists for the Mètiers d’Art prize, announced late last month.)
“I make many collaborations with the office of the prime minister regarding public gifts to visitors and dignitaries, but I was surprised to see this,” Mr. Ruco said. “The prime minister is a great artist himself — painter — so I feel lucky to be understood by him.”
Horological Challenge
Nicolas Wiederrecht, the general director and co-owner of Agenhor, the company that made the watch’s movement, who met Mr. Ruco at a supplier’s fair in 2022, said the Primordial Passion design involved several horological challenges.
“The center of the piece has a massive weight with the decorative double-headed eagle and four musicians above the hands,” he said (the eagle adorns the Albanian flag). “This is too heavy to just put on top of the hands, and normally the center of a movement is busy with the hours and minutes.
“Therefore, we constructed a movement with a hole in the center. This allows you to attach a center weight into a movement — it kind of sits there like a mushroom without affecting the hands or other moving parts.” He added that the company first made this type of movement for Fabergé in 2016.
The future holds other challenges: “Pirro also wants us to make a movement where the dancers are moving,” Mr. Wiederrecht said. “I haven’t yet found the solution. The challenge is that if you make something that moves it must be shock resistant, and it must work upside down — upside down is a big issue.”
He added that he found the detailed facial expressions and clothing details of the dancers and musicians on the Primordial Passion dial “impressive — I don’t know exactly how he did it.”
Asked that question, Mr. Ruco described investing in the latest Swiss watchmaking tools and having artisans with great skills: “One day, I will reveal exactly how I did it.”
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