Lubas & Son

Lubas & Sohn is a former Austrian manufacturer of harmonica instruments .

As early as 1888, Lubas and his son founded a harmonica factory, which was large for the time, in Windischgrätz in Styria (now Slovenj Gradec ) and Unterdrauburg in Carinthia (now Dravograd ), later the company existed for some time in Ljubljana . After 1918 Lubas moved production from Slovenia to Klagenfurt .

The harmonica production of Lubas existed as a family business for three generations until the beginning of the 1960s, until then it was the largest producer of harmonica with helicon voice plates .

Franz Lubas II was murdered by Slovenian partisans in 1945 for political reasons, but his son continued the business. In the 1960s, the company switched to furniture production, and the tools and machines for making harmonica were sold to the Austrian company Novak Harmonikas in Klagenfurt.

In addition to diatonic instruments , Lubas also produced all other types of chromatic accordions . The company exported all over the world, but especially to Eastern Europe.

The helicon instruments were almost identical in construction to the products of the Novak company. The company sign had two mermaids or two angels with trumpets on the treble as decoration. And on the bass part, like the Novak company, the dragon was depicted. When this first came into fashion is unclear, but hardly before 1918. Laibach and Klagenfurt have the Lindwurm in their coat of arms. A number of harmonica makers have been trained at the Lubas company. Among others, Anton Mervar and Josef Fleiß learned the trade in this company.

Josef Fleiß was multilingual (German and Slovenian) and after completing his training he was the managing director of the branch in Slovenia.