It all started on a holiday at my grandparents’, many years ago. Summer days, the freedom and curiosity of boundless exploration, without wasting that precious time from the big vacation on TV, the Internet or social media. Why? Because they didn’t exist at the time. It was better, it was worse… who knows?
On one of those days, I was with the neighbors opposite my grandparents’ house, in a pantry near the shed in the yard, I don’t know exactly what I was doing or just helping the neighbor with something. It is certain that in that pantry, under old things collected over time, on a shelf, under a thick layer of dust, I saw a small table clock, mechanical, which seemed to be one of the most advanced technologies among the other things that he was surrounded.
It was the first impulse, the first seed of curiosity about these simple but complicated mechanisms. It was a functional Russian Slava table clock. For a while the watch sat somewhere in a drawer, not finding its purpose nor the purpose for which it was manufactured.
A few years passed, and during a home improvement it found its place on a corner of a shelf, in a piece of kitchen furniture. This time, seeing it every day, my curiosity did not let me get the better of me and I started looking for information about that watch, at first without internet, it had not yet appeared, but some basic information was still there. That’s how I found out that they were watches made in the U.S.S.R. by the Slava Factory (in translation – Glory) intended for the population, being the second watch factory in Moscow, established in 1924.
What followed next… was a kind of hunt for old watches, at fairs, antique shops, consignment shops, at friends’ grandparents, at older houses… Then the Internet developed and things became more simple and easier for the passion that grew from year to year, from purchase to purchase.
Of course I haven’t stopped looking, I still develop this passion, I still find amazing the ingenuity of those who made them and still their ticking, which connects that past with the present, makes us understand that really all are transient.
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