Петровці Віктор / Petrovtsi Viktor

Hamora on the Kushnitsky stream in the village of Lysychovo, Ukraine, is almost the only operating water smithy in Europe. It is a museum object, a tourist attraction, and an ordinary village smithy. Here hand-made hoes, shovels, spades for inhabitants of surrounding villages are made. Tourists receive horseshoes for souvenirs. The word “”hamora”” comes from German “”Hammer””. A similar name “”hamr”” is used in neighboring Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
The exact date of the water forge foundation is unknown. In the 1860s Count Laszlo Teleki’s paper mill operated here. Then, for the first time, the force of water was used to turn wooden wheels and drive hammers.
Hamora began to function as a smithy in 1850, when Count Teleki founded the Dovžan-Lysychansk Ironworks, which, with a break during the First World War, continued to operate in Czechoslovakia until 1927. Since then, it has operated in the format of a regular smithy. Hamora worked at its full capacity until the floods of 1998. Subsequently, it was leased on a long-term basis by Victor and Olga Petrovtsi.
They restored the dam, made major repairs to the smithy, equipment, created a museum, arranged the territory. Hamora is an iconic historical monument, on the basis of which cultural and artistic events have been held on the last weekend of June since 1987 in order to popularize ethnic and cultural traditions. Since 2007, it has hosted a festival of blacksmith art and ethnic music, the duration of which was interrupted only by the COVID-19 pandemic. Every year the festival was attended by about 10 thousand locals and tourists.
The smithy complex consists of the main building with a working mechanism, a farmyard and a water supply system, through which water is supplied under pressure to the wheel, which drives the hammer inside the building. Today, in addition to the smithy itself, there is a museum of blacksmithing.