Photo : Wikimedia Commons
Musée de la Coutellerie de Thiers
Set in old Thiers, the Cutlery Museum is very much alive, like the craftsmen who busy themselves there. It could not be otherwise, when even today the town supplies nearly 70% of the cutting instruments made in France. The unbreakable ties that unite Thiers and cutlery originate in the thirteenth century, which the museum's first room retraces, with in the leading role not iron mines, but the Durolle, which supplied the motive power.
It is an ensemble exceptional in France and Europe that groups exhibition rooms, collections and an art-cutlery manufacturing company. This museum forms a true memory of five centuries of cutlery heritage. A visit to its workshops will introduce you to knife making. Grinder, assembler, polisher make top-of-the-range pieces there, from the traditional Laguiole to the very contemporary Ax.
The Museum will tell you the adventure of a guild of craftsmen born in the fifteenth century, the story of a technique, a know-how and an indispensable object, the knife: from the simple shepherd's capuchin to the gold and mother-of-pearl jewel of princely tables.
The visitor can now discover in two places: the history and origin of Thiers cutlery, the manufacturing techniques of yesterday and today (thanks to the workshops), the world of nineteenth-century industrial forges and a fantastic collection of knives: from the medieval "coustel" to the prototype of famous designers, from the simple "shepherd's capuchin" to the eighteenth-century gold and mother-of-pearl knife.
