Listening to Pirro Ruço’s life story, you wouldn’t be mistaken for thinking it was a scenario from a blockbuster film. Born and raised in Kucove, Albania, Ruço entered adulthood at a time when Albania’s Stalinist leader, Enver Hoxha and his ruling Party of Labour were making life extremely difficult for all those who opposed his policies. Numerous purges saw “enemies” executed or sent off for lengthy prison sentences. Pirro Ruço’s family were on the list.
“When I finished high-school, I wasn’t allowed to go to university. The regime wanted to send us away to labour camps in the countryside. It wasn’t a prison, but it might as well have been,” shares Ruço. Luckily, his father mastered many skills that were useful to the regime, which saved him and his family from being sent away, but for the young Ruço, many challenges still lay ahead.
He started to make metal frames for eyeglasses, teaching himself the necessary skills. There were no manufacturers for such specific frames in Albania at the time and Ruço was quickly able to create a niche for himself. “Eventually, even the communists were wearing my frames,” he says with a smile.
After three years, the political situation started to relax and he was finally allowed to attend university to study mechanical engineering, albeit only at night. He was assigned a job in a manual job in a factory, but as soon as the regime tightened again, he had to work three shifts. “I was a young man, full of dreams for the future, I just couldn’t accept it,” he says.
He knew that producing eyeglass frames was not enough to survive in this political environment, “I decided to create a pin featuring the dictator’s head so I could open a path of hope for myself and save my family.,” he said. He transformed his bedroom into a workshop with a pantograph machine that could create miniature engraved portrait pins, an act which was to change the course of his life.
In 1986, the famous pin was presented - featuring the now late dictator’s portrait – to party members and artistic division officials in Tirana. They loved the idea of the pin and asked him to produce more for the state, resulting in a production that would reach 23,000 pins and become the official pin for the 9th Congress.
By the beginning of the 1991s, when the regime was finally over, Ruço decided to leave for Greece, where he worked at FaCad’oro, one of the country’s largest jewelry companies. Working as a mechanical engineer he took care of the company’s tools and machinery. When his father passed away, he returned to Albania, but was still dreaming of jewelry even though the country was one of the poorest in the world.
It was at this time that the German bank in Albania was offering business loans to help boost Albania’s production, so Ruço applied. “They told me, ‘There is no bread and you are asking for a mortgage to create a jewelry company,’” he explains. “But it was my lucky year because the president didn’t have any medals” So I was granted a mortgage of 300,000 deutschemark.” With this money, he went to Pforzheim, Germany to buy the first modern laboratory line for metalworking and is proud to have installed it in Tirana, Albania. Also, he brought the first Japanese C.N.C. machine in 1994 – 1995, enabling him to make figurines, medals, filigree, trophies, and coins, to start a fruitful business.
It was during a visit to Baselworld in 2014 that his imagination was captured by the independent watchmakers making extraordinary timepieces, leading him to want to make his own watch. The last five years have been dedicated to the creation of his first piece – the Primordial Passion – which has been a purely artistic adventure.
The timepiece is a celebration of the incredible goldsmithing skills Ruço has learned over his career and an expression of his love for his country’s culture and heritage. It features 12 Albanian folk dancers, representing the 12 regions of the Balkans country, merrily dancing under a large domed sapphire crystal. Over 300 individual pieces make up the 12 figurines that are so intricately designed that they will have you reaching for your loupe. This unique piece was created for the pure joy of creating a timepiece of this artistic complexity and marks the start of a new watch brand with big dreams for the future.
