Folk Hero: Pirro’s Primordial Passion Artfully Celebrates Albanian Culture

Today, watchmaking’s traditional decorative métiers d’art, such as engraving and enameling, continue to thrive, embellishing wristwatches that keep time while making a creative statement. However, some of these techniques are more arcane than others.

With the launch of the Primordial Passion, the Albanian jewelry brand Artistic Jewellery Pirro goes to extreme lengths to celebrate the heritage of ancient Albanian culture, specifically folk dancing, through fine watchmaking.
 

This unique piece is the debut watch for the jeweler, known not only for jewelry but also medals, coin reliefs, miniature sculptures, and handmade filigree artwork, pays tribute to Albanian history and is infused with ethnic spirit. In fact, most of Pirro’s work seeks to build a spiritual bridge connecting the past and future as it became a symbol of national pride and a custodian of ancient Albanian culture.
 

Developed over the course of five years, the Primordial Passion was designed and crafted in-house to embody Pirro’s guiding principles of heritage, artisanal craftsmanship, and precision.

Under the watch’s anti-reflective sapphire crystal dome crowned with a black onyx Pirro emblem, 12 Albanian folk dancers (representing the country’s 12 regions) serve as hour markers and encircle a central black gold sculpted pillar depicting the Albanian flag’s double-headed eagle.
 

This central pillar also has nooks at the base housing four seated musicians engraved in 18-karat gold. Meanwhile, as a more subtle nod to the flag, bi-color hour and minute hands – made with black and yellow 18-karat gold – are shaped like eagle talons.

The 18-karat yellow gold dancing figurines are each unique and so finely rendered that minute details, such as the respective regional embroidery on their costumes, are identifiable. Pirro’s artisans painstakingly engraved the hyper-realistic micro-figurines, which measure between 9mm and 10mm in height.
 

The dial floor underneath their feet is a micro-mosaic composed of 1,500 tiny tiles made of Murano glass in eight shades of gradated red and black with 64 different cuts, with the smallest tile measuring a minuscule 0.2mm.

Outlined in gold, the dial’s geometric pattern also seems to radiate from the center due to the tiles getting larger as they near the periphery. Meanwhile, the red shade of the tiles under the dancers deepens, functioning as a sort of secondary set of hour markers.
 

All the gold components, including the figurines and the case, which measures 46.5mm in diameter (the sapphire crystal dome reaches a height of 22mm), have been produced in-house by Pirro. Finally, theme extends to the solid gold caseback, which is engraved with a rendering of the dial scene in micro-relief.