Dura Pipes (Dura Semjaniv)

Dura Pipes is the name of the workshop that the Swedish maker Dura Semjaniv (d. 2008) ran alone in the south of the country. Semjaniv came to the craft not from a pipe-making bench but from behind a tobacco counter: while running a tobacconist's shop in Malmö, he learned to repair customers' pipes, and from there moved on to making his own.

His limited annual output and his shape vocabulary tied to classic proportions made his name known mostly among collector circles; his pipes carry the stamp "Dura Sweden."

From Repair Bench to Maker

A long-established tobacconist's shop called Pip-Larsson, opened in Malmö in 1905, existed; Semjaniv bought it in 1985. He kept up the repair service the shop's former owner, Olle Jonsson, had run, acquired the necessary tools, and learned the trade from Jonsson. The years spent on repair steered him toward making his own pipes. On a customer's recommendation he reached the maker Arne Ljung, who worked in the Limhamn district of Malmö; Ljung was past eighty at the time, and Semjaniv received from him both briar blocks and the fundamentals of the craft. The closeness that formed between the two makers resulted, after Ljung's death, in the tools from his workshop and five folders full of classic shape drawings passing to Semjaniv; records indicate that in these drawings the bulldog family carried a notable weight.