Ladislav Duraj worked as an electrical installer at the Ferozliatinová plant in Istebné. Currently a craftsman. In the 1980s, as part of the educational project “Man and His Creative Interests,” he created sculptures from the agricultural environment of Orava, which he exhibited in Nitra, Ružomberok, Dolný Kubín, and Liptovský Hrádok. In 1986, he acquired a non-functional heligonium from Josef Hlaváček’s company in Zázrivá and created a new instrument based on it. Since then, his production and repair of heligones and other accordions have been based on this instrument. He makes instrument cases from spruce wood. The bellows are made of leather, mostly covered in his own paper with the imprint of so-called Slovak music. The central motifs include heraldic symbols of Slovakia, Orava, and Žaškov, representing the folk instrumental culture. He orders metal parts for the heligones from a company producing diatonic harmonicas in Hořovice, Czech Republic. These parts have significant decorative functions on the instrument, such as soundboxes, bellows edges, strap clips, buttons with rods, and ornamental plates covering the melodic and bass parts of the instrument. He also orders reeds (tone-producing devices) for harmonicas from this company, tuning them using a Korg brand automatic chromatic tuner. Before 1993, he used to have reeds tuned at the company in Hořovice. The most important artistic elements of the instrument, ensuring its originality and individuality, are the name of the (traditional) manufacturer and the so-called pattern. Ladislav Duraj orders the names (Josef Hlaváček) from the Hořovice company because they are so perfectly crafted that he couldn’t produce them as well using his own technical means. The pattern is a belt ornament on the instrument’s soundbox. It is made from cardboard sticks, dyed with desired colors, and glued along the length so that the reflection of the glued stick creates a separate motif unit of the pattern. One of the motif units Duraj uses is a double rose (also using the swan motif), which consists of 14 x 54 (approximately millimeter-sized) squares. The pattern is cut from the stick with a thickness of approximately 0.6 mm. These pieces are glued around the soundboxes, adding artistic individualization to the instrument.