The broom maker from Clejani

Cristian Ștefan is 62 years old. Everyone calls him Fane. He lives in Clejani, a village in Giurgiu county, southern Romania, and he makes brooms.

He’s been making them since he was seventeen. His mother and father sat at the kitchen table tying straw, and he sat beside them, watching their fingers move. “I liked seeing how it was done,” he says. “I knew this: if you don’t take up something yourself, you have no fate in life.”

In winter his hands froze, in summer they sweated, but he never stopped working.

Fane finished vocational school and went to work at 23 August, one of Bucharest’s old factories. Then it was torn down. He moved to the CAP, the agricultural cooperative. That closed in ’91. He spent a few years at the town hall in Clejani before his legs gave out and he had to stop. Each door that opened closed behind him. The brooms stayed.

He grew the straw himself, 5.000-10.000 square meters at a time. He cut it in the field with a sickle and a knife. He hauled it home in a horse-cart, dried it, threshed it on a small machine at night because the days were too hot to work. He tied the sheaves and stood them upright so the wind and sun would dry the seed. Then he sat down and made brooms: long ones with handles, handhelds, the small ones for sweeping crumbs.

For decades he carried 150 brooms a week on his back to the train station, climbed onto the train, and sold them at Obor in Bucharest. When Obor got too crowded he tried Big and Rahova. The police took his goods more than once. He came home in tears. The brooms stayed in some warehouse, and he started over. “I know what they did with them,” he says, with the calm of a man who has learned not to argue with the world.

He has four sons. None of them make brooms. One drives a bus. One works in Bucharest. Two are on construction sites. Fane doesn’t seem to mind. “What I want most is to be healthy,” he says. “Me and her. The kids, the grandkids, all of them well.”

The market for brooms is shrinking. People tell him they have a vacuum cleaner now. He shrugs. “You pay for the vacuum. You pay for the electricity. The broom needs nothing.”

So, every Sunday his son and his wife load up for the country fair: Bolintin Vale, Domnești, Roata Jos, and the local one in Clejani. A handheld broom is 25 lei. The big one with a handle is 30. If you buy a few, he’ll come down to 20. It’s in the market and it’s cheaper.

That’s how it goes. The factories closed, the cooperatives closed, the markets emptied out. The broom is still here. So is Fane and he’s still making them. 

But he cannot walk and go to sell them in markets anymore.

Now he sells his brooms on PappoCrafts.ro.

You can buy his products here: https://pappocrafts.ro/produse/accesorii-eco-naturale/maturici-perii-paie/

You can find his story on our Facebook page as well: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1978586466356482

Follow us and find out more about his skill in future videos.