Hungarian royal silk spinning mill
1900sSilk Spinning Mill
The caption is Hungarian alone and gives the mill the royal Hungarian title, so this was a state enterprise and the card was issued before 1918, with the imprint of the court photographer József Singer up the margin. Well over a hundred of the workforce have turned out in the factory yard, almost all of them women and girls in aprons and headscarves, many of them clearly children and some barefoot.
About this place
The Royal Hungarian silk filature at Novi Sad was one of a chain of mills built under the state silk programme that Pál Bezerédj ran from 1880, alongside works at Pančevo, Tolna, Győr, Komárom, Novi Kneževac, Mohács, Békéscsaba and Lugoj. The programme lifted the country's annual cocoon crop from a few tonnes to two thousand, and by 1905 Hungary stood third in Europe for silk after Italy and France. The mills employed women and girls, and the postcard here shows the whole workforce of the Novi Sad house drawn up in the yard in headscarves and aprons; a hostel for those who came from outside the town was opened in Novi Sad in 1914. Silk settled in the Almaš quarter of Podbara, where the works were known as the Svilara and the dye house was reckoned the largest silk factory in Hungary. The trade lasted in the quarter into the 1970s, tall blocks of flats went up on the factory ground in the 1960s, and one surviving building now serves as a cultural centre.
On the card
Magy. kir. selyemfonoda. / Ujvidék. / Singer József udv. fényképész kiadása.
- Date
- 1900s
- Coordinates
- 45.26256, 19.84965
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain (historical photograph)
- Size
- 1158 × 902 px
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