Sacred Steel: The Balinese Smiths Who Forge Daggers With Prayers, Not Just Fire

Not Just a Knife

Walk into Empu Suprapto's workshop in Klungkung, and the first thing you notice isn't the heat. It's the incense. Coils of it curl around iron rods, hand-hammered tools, and small offerings of flowers left on the anvil before the day's work begins. This isn't a factory. It isn't even really a studio in any sense a Brooklyn maker-space would recognize. It's closer to a temple that happens to have a forge in it.

Suprapto is an empu — a master keris maker — one of fewer than two dozen still practicing in Bali with full traditional knowledge. The keris, that distinctively wavy-bladed ceremonial dagger you've probably seen in museum cases or on the cover of some anthropology textbook, has been central to Indonesian spiritual and social life for over a thousand years. UNESCO recognized it in 2008 as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. But recognition on a list doesn't keep a craft breathing. People do.

What Makes a Keris a Keris

First, let's get past the idea that this is just a fancy knife. A keris is a layered object — physically, culturally, and spiritually. The blade is forged from multiple types of iron and steel, often including pamor, a nickel-rich meteorite iron that creates those distinctive swirling patterns on the surface. The number of folds in the metal, the number of waves (luk) in the blade, the motifs in the pamor — every single element carries meaning. A blade with seven waves carries different energy than one with eleven. The pattern that looks like rice grains is an omen of prosperity. The one that resembles a snake's spine? That one's a little more complicated.

Suprapto explains it with the patience of someone who has answered this question a thousand times but still means it: "The keris is not made for cutting. It is made for carrying spirit. A good empu doesn't just know metallurgy. He must understand the cosmos."

The forging process itself can take weeks or months, depending on the complexity of the blade. It involves prayers at specific points in the process, ritually chosen days based on the Balinese calendar, and offerings that wouldn't look out of place at a temple ceremony. The empu fasts before beginning certain stages. This is not metaphor. It is practice.

The Knowledge Gap — and Who's Bridging It

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the apprenticeship pipeline that sustained this craft for centuries nearly collapsed in the late 20th century. Urbanization, economic pressure, and the sheer difficulty of the training — which can take a decade before a student is trusted to work independently — pushed younger generations toward more accessible careers. By the early 2000s, experts were openly worried about the craft dying within a generation.

What happened instead was more interesting. A small but committed cohort of younger Balinese artists, some trained formally and some self-taught through obsessive study, started coming back to the forge. Not always to make traditional keris for traditional purposes, but to engage with the form on their own terms.

I Wayan Darta, 34, is one of them. He grew up watching his grandfather make keris in Gianyar, moved to Denpasar to study graphic design, and spent five years working in branding before returning to the workshop. "I thought I was leaving this behind," he says, laughing. "Then I realized everything I was doing — composition, symbolism, the relationship between form and meaning — I'd already learned it here, in this room."

Darta now makes what he calls keris kontemporer — contemporary keris. The blades maintain traditional pamor techniques and the correct metallurgical layering, but the hilts and sheaths (wrongko) incorporate materials like reclaimed wood, resin, and in one striking series, fragments of old Balinese lontar manuscripts sealed under lacquer. His work has been shown in Jakarta, Singapore, and most recently at a craft fair in Portland, Oregon, where it sold out in two days.

When Sacred Meets Market

The question of commercialization is one that hangs over every conversation about traditional craft entering global markets, and keris is no exception. There's a real tension here that nobody pretends doesn't exist.

For practicing Hindu Balinese families, a keris is a pusaka — a sacred heirloom with genuine spiritual power, not a decorative object. Selling one is not straightforward; in many cases, a keris is understood to have its own will about where it wants to be. Older empu are often selective about who they'll make blades for, and the idea of a keris ending up as a conversation piece on some tech executive's shelf in San Francisco gives some masters genuine pause.

But others are more pragmatic. "If the craft dies," says Suprapto, "then nothing is sacred. There is no keris at all. Better that some blades travel than that the knowledge disappears."

Darta threads the needle differently. His contemporary pieces are explicitly framed as art objects, not ritual ones. He's transparent about what they are and what they aren't. "I'm not selling you a pusaka," he tells buyers. "I'm selling you a conversation with a tradition. That's still worth something."

The Blade as Living Archive

What strikes you most, spending time around these workshops, is how much information is stored in the physical object itself. A keris made in East Java looks different from one made in Bali. A blade from the 16th century carries different pamor patterns than one from the 19th. For historians, anthropologists, and increasingly for contemporary artists, the keris is a kind of archive — a record of aesthetic choices, spiritual beliefs, and technical knowledge that survived colonialism, political upheaval, and the flattening pressures of globalization.

That's what the younger makers seem to understand most clearly. They're not just preserving a technique. They're preserving a way of thinking about objects — that things made with intention carry that intention forward. In a world drowning in mass-produced stuff, there's something almost radical about that.

Back in the workshop, Suprapto is heating a rod of iron to orange. The incense is still burning. He doesn't look up. "Every blade remembers who made it," he says. "That's why you have to be careful."

He brings the hammer down, and the sound rings out across the courtyard like a bell.