The present-day number of tinsmiths has changed a lot compared to the number of tinsmiths in the town after the 1950s. However, the biggest difference is that tinsmith’s trade has come down to fitting nowadays. All elements are bought as finished products, and they are fitted then. Based on what Milan Kovačević and Bratislav Đurković told us, we can see what it looked like doing this trade more than half a century ago when their fathers started doing this business. Bratislav Đurković’s father Jovan Đurković, who was tinsmith himself, had a shop where Cultural centre is located nowadays, and he learned the trade with a famous and renowned master of post-war Gornji Milanovac, Vlado Đurić. Jovan mostly made tin (fancy) goods (pots, tubs, buckets…). Stanimir Kovačević was the first generation of a vocational school, which educated different tradesmen in town at that time. He started his own tinsmith shop in 1958, at the place where Maksi supermarket is located today. He mostly made gutters and construction sheet-metal goods, which was difficult at the time because they didn’t have suitable transport.

Gutters were transported to the villages in a horse-drawn vehicle, and they were carried on the back to the place where they were to be fitted in the town. He also made custom fancy goods. It is interesting that Stanimir was hired to make licence plates for German lorries for the making of the film “Mirko and Slavko”, where one can see – among everything else – his shop in some of the scenes. When in 1962, Tito and Brežnjev formally opened a memorial dedicated to the Red Army soldiers who were killed in the battles for liberating this area, a few tinsmiths from Gornji Milanovac were hired to put gutters on all the houses which didn’t have them near the memorial park Brdo mira, with the aim for everything to look more beautiful and luxurious when they would go past them. Every tinsmith had something recognisable – in Stanimir’s case that was a pattern at the end of the gutter, so one can exactly know which gutter in town was made by him. All tools which were used back then were manual, and machines themselves were started manually. A bending machine was used for bending tin, a pleating machine for making folds, then they used different types of scissors (round, straight, left, right), pliers (flat nose pliers, seaming pliers). The machine which was used for riveting was called a riveting machine.