Dolia'S Watchmaking

Dolia'S Watchmaking is the young, self-made brand of Tymofii Dolia — a Ukrainian-born watchmaker whose path began at his grandfather's workbench and has carried him, via Barcelona and Prague, into the small circle of genuine independents. Dolia traces his love of the craft to childhood, watching his grandfather repair old clocks and watches in a small room and finding it magic to hold a broken watch and diagnose its trouble — listening to its ticking, he has said, like listening to its own personal language. He was servicing customer watches at his grandfather's workshop by age 14, and in 2015, determined to learn far more than simple repair, enrolled at the Institut Mare de Déu de la Mercè, Barcelona's watchmaking school, graduating in 2018 despite arriving without fluent Spanish. His real education in fine watchmaking came after: an apprenticeship at Pita Barcelona under Aniceto Jimenez Pita — a former member of the AHCI, the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants — alongside Eduard Farré and Jose Matas Rovira, with George Daniels' Watchmaking as his constant text. Now based in Prague, Dolia works high-end watches by day and, as he puts it, builds pieces from a desire out of his heart by night, giving each one something of himself.

His debut, presented in late 2022, is the D01S Chronograph — built entirely around the concept of Yin & Yang, the Chinese philosophy of interconnected opposites. Dolia wanted something mystical and not fully legible at a glance, a design carrying real philosophical weight: two elements in opposition yet interdependent, expressing the balance that allows the universe to exist. That duality plays out across the whole watch. The dial — entirely handmade, like the hands, subdials, and oscillating weight — is fashioned from bronze and aluminium finished with contrasting hammering and sandblasting techniques, its hour and minute counters ringed in blued steel; a chapter ring beneath the bezel carries the hour and minute indices, read by hands finished in different heat-blued tones to distinguish time-telling from chronograph functions. The 904L stainless steel case (41mm × 15.7mm) carries a hammered bezel, pushers, and crown to match the dial's texture, while select movement screws and levers are heat-blued by hand — visible to any watchmaker who opens the case.

Beneath the yin-yang-decorated display back sits a modified ETA/Valjoux 7750–7753 chronograph movement, its full oscillating rotor Dolia's own design — made in bronze and weighted in 18k gold to echo the dial's material language, appearing simultaneously open and closed through the sapphire caseback. Limited to just 10 pieces at EUR 6,000 excluding taxes and delivered with a handmade leather case and elephant- and shark-leather straps, the D01S sold out its first series almost immediately; unclaimed examples have since changed hands through Ineichen Zürich's INDEPENDENTS auctions, where Dolia is billed as a dark-horse independent likely to make his name. Dolia accepts bespoke commissions in the same spirit as the D01S and, with his first watch behind him, has said simply that he has plenty of ideas for what comes next.