LIFE AT KARANGDADAP BRICK CENTER, PEKALONGAN

People will mention batik and durian when asked about Pekalongan. However, few people know that this city is also a center for brick production. In fact, the bricks produced by the craftsmen here have been shipped as far as Kalimantan and Sulawesi.

 

I learned this new thing when I stopped by to take a photo series there at the end of last December. Starting from getting lost while looking for a way to the Doro area to take pictures of his trademark durian as work material, again Google Maps and local residents showed me a new place. This time it is called Karangdadap, a sub-district which is about 30 minutes from Pekalongan.

 

At least, there are two villages there which are the center, namely Kebonrowo Pucang and Pangkah. Dozens of semi-permanent wooden huts roofed with dried coconut leaves are neatly lined up along the two village roads. I see it as housing because of the similar shape of the huts. Mounds of chaff and firewood were left to pile up in front of him.

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Inside one of the huts, you can see thousands of stacked bricks that have turned reddish in color after being "cooked" with the husks. Several workers were busy molding, stacking, and trimming the outer edges of the bricks to make them more tidy in their fields. Interestingly, most of the workers there are from outside the village. In fact, some are willing to go far from Petungkriono, a sub-district in the south of Pekalongan which is located close to the Dieng plateau. In a day, a worker there can produce about a thousand raw bricks. The number can increase when the weather is sunny.

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It takes patience to burn thousands of these bricks. It is this process that determines whether they make a total profit or loss, as the soil for bricks can only be burned once. The bricks are stacked with a tunnel, a kind of stove for firewood, then added with husks on top and wood in the base pile. They take two to three full days to get rosy and ready to go.