A pontoon bridge made of a row of boat-shaped hulls lashed together carries a plank roadway and railing across the calm water, a man in a bowler hat leaning on the rail in the right foreground and a streetlamp standing partway along. Beyond, Petrovaradin's fortress walls and its clock tower rise on the hill above a church spire and rooftops at the water's edge. The card is captioned Festung Peterwardein, Grad Petrovaradin and Pétervárad-vár, in German, Serbo-Croatian and Hungarian.
About this place
Before any permanent bridge stood here, Novi Sad and Petrovaradin were joined by a wooden pontoon bridge laid across the Danube on oak floats. Crossings of this kind were used from the late seventeenth century, and the first standing bridge dates from 1788; it was known as Hagen's bridge after the officer, Baron von Hagen, who designed it on the model of one at Mannheim. It was laid each spring by the pontonier unit stationed at Petrovaradin and taken up again before the first ice, and its middle section could be drawn aside to let river traffic through. Carts paid a toll while anything carried by hand went free, residents of the two towns crossed without charge, and the season opened every year with a handshake between the mayor of Novi Sad and the commandant of the fortress. The bridge was removed for the last time in 1918, when work began on the permanent crossing that became the Prince Tomislav bridge.
On the card
The pontoon bridge
- Date
- 1900
- Coordinates
- 45.25463, 19.85729
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 1162 × 772 px
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