Groups of traveling traditional building craftsmen (mpouloukia) from Greece worked throughout the Balkans in the last three centuries, and without doubt, they managed to establish a special local architectural identity. The essay focuses on searching and chronicling the technics and the practices the craftsmen used, their everyday and their professional life. At the same time the essay tries to highlight the internal relationship between the creator (craftsman), the material (stone, wood, tools) and the creation (building). The balance between their buildings and the natural environment indicates a balanced relationship between the members of the team. The specific roles and responsibilities, the hierarchy, the team rules, the organization of travel, the apprenticeship and the family tradition in the building profession, are all characteristics of a closed professional team, deriving from a self-sufficient past community that needed this particular professional adaptation to make a living. In the light of modern social and economic practices the building custom of mpouloukia seems to be totally out of context, but its philosophy can be identified in groups of construction professionals and architectural practices of today; some of them are being broached at the end of the research. The catholic model of the craftsman (“a person that has an enduring basic impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own shake”, according to R. Sennet) and the need of a practical experience in combination with present design ambitions, is slowly leading to an adaptation of practices similar to the ones of mpouloukia.