Selmec (Schemnitz) Pipes

Selmec pipes is the collective name for the glazed clay pipes produced in Selmecbánya, the famous mining town in the north of the Kingdom of Hungary. The town appears as Schemnitz in German sources and as Banská Štiavnica in present-day Slovakia; the pipes likewise appear under all three names depending on the language used. Selmec has no kinship with the English school, the first thing that usually comes to mind with European clay pipe making; the family tree of the shapes here stretches not west but east.

A Shape Drawn from the Ottoman Chibouk

Bringing goods to northern Hungary from the west was not easy; because English and Dutch pipes were rarely seen in the region, local makers had no examples to work from either. The model came from the east instead: the chibouk bowl that entered Europe by way of the Ottomans. The type worked by pipe makers in Buda is especially determinative. In that type the bowl is close to cylindrical and relatively tall, closing at the bottom with a hemispherical body, while the neck is short and ringed; the angle at which the neck joins the bowl is around sixty degrees. For the Istanbul branch of the same craft, see the entry on Tophane pipe-making.

Once Selmec's makers had taken over this basic form, they placed their own signatures on the base of the bowl. The base is worked far more densely than the main body; the fan-like shell-and-leaf ornament that opens across it is considered the defining motif of this school. The motif did not stay in Selmec — it also seeped into the work of Austrian, German, and French workshops. The bowls themselves are often faceted into polygonal surfaces and bear the maker's stamp.

Material and Color

Because of their bright, translucent glazed surfaces, Selmec bowls are often described in older sources as "hard stone" or stoneware. In reality they are fired clay: white clay is mixed in for durability, red clay for shine. The common colors are dark red, terracotta, brown, and black; more rarely, veined or speckled green and blue examples are also known. For the general material background, see the entry on clay pipes.

Many examples carry the town's seal on the front. The two lizards and the mining tools on the seal come from the town's coat of arms. According to local legend, two lizards — one gleaming gold, the other silver — led a shepherd to the place where the riches lay hidden, and that is how the town's mining is said to have begun.

Rise and Decline

It is generally accepted that the local population became acquainted with pipe smoking in the years after 1663, when the armies gathered to defend Vienna moved through northern Hungary; the beginning of pipe making in Selmec is also dated to this period, judging by the shape's characteristics. Production only became genuinely organized in the early eighteenth century. A single source names Benjamin Annert and F. Netter as the two figures of this early phase; this has not been confirmed by independent records. The picture is clearer for the nineteenth century: nearly twenty workshops have been identified in the town, and makers such as S. Boscovitz, Anton Partsch, Jacob Reinitz, S. Seiler, and Károly Zachar are known by their stamps. The requirement to stamp goes back to a Habsburg regulation from the start of the century.

The peak came in the nineteenth century, and politics played a large part in it. Lajos Kossuth, exiled after the 1848 independence movement was crushed, was first hosted on Ottoman soil and then, in 1851–1852, toured America from end to end. Wherever he went, the Selmec bowl became known along with him; the pipe caught on first in Ottoman lands, then in northern Italy, and finally in America. This wave did not last long: toward the end of the century the market pulled back to a local scale, workshops closed one by one, and the molds ended up in the hands of a small number of makers. According to records, the last producer held on until the middle of the twentieth century. Today Selmec bowls are found only in museums and collections, standing as witnesses to a shared origin with Ottoman chibouk culture.