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Thurje Handmade · Brand
An experiment that became a
workshop.
A language spoken only by hands
— founded 2020
Thurje began not as a finished idea, but as a question: what happens when contemporary design meets the oldest weaving tradition in Albania? Founded in 2020 in Korça — initially without a physical space — the brand started as a bridge between young designers and local artisans, working to prove that Albanian craft could hold its own in the contemporary interior market. In June 2024, the workshop opened its first permanent space in the Old Bazaar of Korça. The experiment became a practice.
— brand positioning
A women-led artisan brand from Korçë, weaving Albanian heritage into contemporary interiors.
Thurje began not as a finished idea, but as a question: what happens when contemporary design meets the oldest weaving tradition in Albania? Founded in 2020 in Korça — initially without a physical space — the brand started as a bridge between young designers and local artisans, working to prove that Albanian craft could hold its own in the contemporary interior market. In June 2024, the workshop opened its first permanent space in the Old Bazaar of Korça. The experiment became a practice.
2020
founded Korçë
2024
first permanent workshop
75%
of orders are custom-made
100%
women-led workshop
— Backstage
Mikaela Maçka
Co-founder · Curator & Production
She works with plans, not announcements. Mikaela holds the structure of what Thurje makes — the design proposals, the technical drawings, the production timelines, the dialogue between what a designer imagines and what a loom can hold. She is the one who decides whether the grid works before a single thread is warped.
“A rug begins long before the loom. If the drawing isn’t right, nothing after it will be.”
— Frontstage
Xhorxhia Maçka
Co-founder · Public Relations & People
She is the voice of the brand and the person who holds its human relationships together — with clients, collaborators, artisans, and the public. Xhorxhia manages what Thurje says and who it says it to, and is responsible for the artisans’ integration into the workshop’s culture. She keeps the front door open.
“The brand is not what we make. It is what people feel when they hear our name.”
— The people who weave
"A language spoken only by hands — and carried, in Albania, almost entirely by women."
The weavers at Thurje are women from Korça and the surrounding region. Their knowledge is not learned from books — it is carried in the body, passed between generations within families, refined over decades of work at the loom. It is the same tradition that Ikbal Mustafa Bihiku documented in 1960, still alive in the same city, in the same hands.
The number of artisans working with Thurje changes with the rhythm of production — some periods are fuller than others. This is the honest reality of a small, growing workshop. What remains constant is the commitment to the people who do the work — to making the collaboration worth their time, and to ensuring their names and skills are part of what Thurje presents to the world. Every piece carries a weaver credit. The craft is never anonymous here.
— Thurje's position
“Artisan work in Albania is often invisible. We think it should be seen — and that the people who do it should be recognised for the knowledge they carry.”
Weaving as a language,
not a relic
— the origin concept
Thurje Handmade is an Albanian workshop and brand dedicated to contemporary handwoven rugs. Founded in Korça in 2020, it began with a single conviction: that Albania’s weaving tradition did not need to be preserved in the past tense.
Weaving is Albania’s oldest language. Thurje Handmade does not “save” this language, we weaponize it to speak of the future . We take the ancestral grit of the loom and use it to translate contemporary visions into architecture centerpieces. Not heritage as museum piece. Heritage as active material.
The name itself says it plainly. Thurje means weaving in Albanian — the physical act and the conceptual one simultaneously: weaving together tradition, design, and the imaginations of a new generation. We are not preserving a craft, we are archiving the evolution of human imagination in wool.
Exhibited at the Ministry of Culture
— april · july 2021
In April 2021 — less than a year after founding, and still without a permanent workshop — Thurje exhibited at the Art Pavilion of the Ministry of Culture in Tirana, a programme dedicated to showcasing contemporary Albanian artists in public institutional spaces. Three collections were presented: Bllok, Hare, and Lin — each made by artisans from Korça, each demonstrating a different register of the collaboration between traditional weaving technique and contemporary design thinking. It was the first time the brand placed its work in a national institutional context, and it established something important: that what Thurje makes is not craft in the folkloric sense, but a form of applied art with a legitimate place in the public cultural conversation.