Years ago, she never imagined that she would once be doing this job. But now the craft, to which she has devoted almost 30 years, means everything to her.

“It’s a long story,” she begins when asked how she entered the umbrella repair business. “My father opened a workshop in 1966. He found himself deeply in debt and had a hard time getting a permit from the municipality.” Her father then became ill and had trouble with his sight, which was a bad sign for the workshop: “He said that he could either close the business or that I could come work with him.”

Marija was a kindergarten teacher by training and worked with children for six years, but she joined her father, who taught her the skills of umbrella repair. After his death, she decided to carry on as an umbrella repair woman. No one forced her hand: “I could easily have said ‘no’ to my dad, but I somehow ended up staying in this profession.” Is she happy with her decision? “Very much so.”

She keeps no records of how many umbrellas she has repaired, but she has so much work that she sometimes takes it home with her. Each repair takes several hours, but some of the defects are more serious, and occasionally she needs a week to make a broken umbrella come back to life: “There are things that are more challenging than others. They annoy you, so you put them off, but I’m very stubborn and persistent, so I end up fixing 98 percent of all my umbrellas.”

And what happens to the remaining two percent? “I talk to my customers; we can usually replace the mechanism, but there are other solutions.” When all the options run out, she turns the umbrellas into bags: “You can make pretty shopping bags out of their cloth canopies.”

Marija has some advice for everyone: “Don’t throw out your old things. Buy a good umbrella and it can serve you for a hundred years. My motto is: fix things, not just umbrellas, but other objects as well. Buy quality objects and get them repaired. Fix your old things to preserve nature.”