CHAO DE PARADA, Portugal (Reuters) – Husband and wife Francisco and Casilda Figueiredo are among the last exponents of a traditional Portuguese handicraft — making ornamental ceramic penises.

For more than three decades, the couple have carefully shaped thousands of ceramic male organs, molding them into upright shapes and painting them in life-like colors for export to Germany, France and North America.

Francisco and Casilda, aged 68 and 65, still toil away in a humble village workshop in the Caldas da Rainha region, about 100 km (60 miles) north of Lisbon, but say the tradition is dying out.

“The days of the ceramics trade here are numbered, I see no possibility of survival,” Francisco said as he prepared molds of the couple’s top-of-the-range two-foot phallic-shaped bottles in his workshop. “It will never be like it was in the past.”

The bottle sells for 15 euros (11.8 pounds)

The tradition is said to have started in Caldas da Rainha

when King Dom Luis, who ruled from 1861 to 1889, suggested that local potters make something more interesting.

A renowned caricaturist, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, gave the initial inspiration, prompting Caldas da Rainha to expand on its tradition as a pottery center.

“Nobody knows exactly what started the tradition, they say it was Dom Luis, but I don’t know if it’s true or not,” said Francisco.

The traditional craft has faced a slow decline as buyers in Portugal and beyond become more liberal and the figures lose their ability to provoke.

The couple produce ceramic mugs with a penis sticking out of the bottom or the side, penis-shaped bottles and ceramic soccer figures with the male organ popping out from under a flag.

Francisco said that during the peak of their business they were producing 1,000 bottles a month.

“There were many people making ceramics, but now locally there is just us,” said Casilda. “We exported to Germany, Canada and France. Today we just sell to visitors and local shops.”

KINSHASA (Reuters) – Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

“You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings. … You see them covered in marks after being beaten,” Kinshasa’s police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.