“Jo please, come in!”, calls Rupert Leikam in response to the timid knock on the wooden door. The man from Knappenberg keeps an open house. Or rather: an open workshop. “When I’m there, anyone can come and have a look. Of course, I don’t always have time for a tour of the workshop, but there’s plenty to see in the showroom at the back, even without me.”
You wouldn’t know it by looking at the likeable man with the Toni Sailer smile and the blue work coat, but he is actually the last of his kind: currently the only master pewterer in Austria, who also runs the only pewter foundry in Carinthia. The heyday of this craft in our latitudes has actually been over since the 15th and 16th centuries. Leikam didn’t care much about this from the very beginning. Exactly 100 years after the last pewter foundry in Carinthia closed, he opened his in the former mining village of Knappenberg in the Görtschitz Valley. Not only does he keep an old craft alive, his pewter foundry is also a pleasantly unaffected place for exciting experiences and genuine human encounters.
Shimmering souvenirs from the Görtschitz Valley
“As a trained metalworker, I worked in a pewter foundry in Salzburg for ten years. I then bought the machines from a company that had closed down – and returned to my home in Görtschitztal,” says the master pewterer as he leans over the melting furnace, where a bar of pewter is melting away. He is about to pour the shiny liquid into a silicone mold and get the centrifugal casting machine next to it up and running.
This is how the small souvenirs are created that many people take home from the Heinrich Harrer Museum in Hüttenberg, the Jufa Hotel or the show mine in Knappenberg: Small pewter buddhas and yaks, the endless knot, a Buddhist symbol of good luck, unusual pewter jewelry or coin lucky charms. Clubs and communities also appreciate Leikam’s work and order trophies and plates from him. And the large orders, where handmade, elaborate pewter work is in demand, often come from abroad. So he never gets bored, the master pewterer.
A workshop like in the old days
All of these pewter products can also be found in his showroom and salesroom right next to his workshop. And that alone is worth a visit. The cast-iron tiled windows tell of a time when the workshop was still used as a carpentry workshop for the then flourishing mining industry. Inside, narrow, winding paths lead past machines, workbenches, storage and workstations, it smells of fire, lubricating oil and metal, a radio babbles away. It seems as improvised as it is practical, with little electricity and a lot of real manual work. Places like this are very rare these days. Where else can you simply walk into such an honest workshop and look over the master’s shoulder? Rupert Leikam accepts this enthusiasm with a relaxed smile, as is his way. He sits engrossed at his workbench and puts the finishing touches to the small pewter figures by hand.
It is unmistakable: this man has time.
And he is probably one of the last of his kind…
