SU Pipes Smooth Horn w/ Case Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Description

You may have wondered, as I often do, what would happen if professional meerschaum carver was to turn their attention to briar wood, and to make pipes out of that instead. While many early briar pipe manufacturers, such as Frederick Charatan, made just such a transition back in the late 19th century, both briar and meerschaum pipe manufacture have changed significantly in the century since, making for an interesting opportunity. Enter Sebahattin Urgan of SU Pipes, former apprentice to Eskişehir’s master of meerschaum Emre Bay and now an expert carver in his own right. Urgan’s talents have in recent years extended to handcrafting briar pipes, having been greatly inspired by the legends of Scandinavian and post-Scandinavian design.

I’ve always thought that, in the last decades of the 20th century and onward, Danish, and Danish-style, pipe making broke even further ground than it had in the decades prior, and in a sense our terminologies for describing such works still hasn’t caught up. I still struggle to think what to call some of the pipes of Benni Jorgensen, Tonni Nielsen, or Teddy Knudsen (other than “excellent”), as while they are often grounded in what had become staples of the craft, they were, nonetheless, substantially different. This pipe, from Turkish meerschaum carver and briar artisan Sebahattin Urgan seems to follow in that same vein, taking the form of what could be considered a horn, or perhaps a cobra of sorts, but whose liberal use of furrows and furls frees it from easy categorization. I suppose when a pipe looks as nice as this one does, it doesn’t really matter what you call it.

As it is an SU Pipe, this pipe comes also with one of Urgan’s signature, custom-fitted hard cases, making for easy travel and care.

Details:

Length: 6″ / 152.4mm

Bowl Width: 0.79 / 20.06mm

Bowl Depth: 1.60″ / 40.64mm

Weight: 2.2oz / 64g