The viewer stands on the embankment where the demolished road bridge meets the shore. Six soldiers pose on its collapsed steel spans, one astride a bent girder, with ornamental ironwork still visible on the wreckage. A railing lines the embankment in the foreground and a wooded far bank shows across the water. This was the Danube road bridge the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had named Most kraljevica Tomislava, destroyed in April 1941 as German-led forces invaded. The donor dated this print to 1942.
About this place
The Prince Tomislav bridge was the first permanent road bridge over the Danube between Novi Sad and Petrovaradin. It was built between 1921 and 1928, and it opened a boulevard along which Novi Sad grew down to the river and tied the city to Petrovaradin on the far bank. The Water Gate of the Petrovaradin lower town and the Danube fortifications were pulled down in the early 1920s to clear the ground for it. Yugoslav forces mined the bridge in 1941, the German occupiers rebuilt it, and it was destroyed again during their retreat in 1944; the replacement raised on the same crossing after the war was named for Marshal Tito. In photographs it is told apart from the town’s other crossings by the spiked finials along its truss, a silhouette that recalls the bridges of Budapest.
- Date
- 1942
- Coordinates
- 45.25463, 19.85729
- Source
- Fortepan
- Credit
- Fortepan / Zagyva Tiborné
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Size
- 4099 × 2639 px
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