A real-photo postcard, taken from an upper window, looks across the main square to the Town Hall, its arcaded front and central clock tower standing beyond a fenced garden of lawn and young pollarded trees. Two pairs of tram rails curve out of the foreground and across the granite setts, a covered cab and a second carriage wait at the kerb on the left, a cyclist and pedestrians cross the roadway, and a boxy saloon car stands under the arcade. The dark flank of a tall fluted structure with a carved band cuts into the right edge close to the camera, and a shop awning below it is lettered in Latin script, the Serbian spelling used after 1918.
About this place
The Town Hall, still known in Novi Sad as the Magistrat, stands on Trg slobode opposite the Catholic church and has housed the city government for more than a century. The office dates from 1748, when the settlement then called the Petrovaradin Trench was raised to a free royal city, but for its first century and a half the magistracy rented one building after another around the town. Where the new house should stand was fought over: Svetozar Miletić and his supporters wanted it in the quarter where the Serbs lived, the Catholics wanted it on the main square facing their church, and the Catholics won. György Molnár, who took no fee for the work, revised his plans several times and looked partly to the town hall at Graz; Karl Lerer and Jožef Cocek built it between 1893 and 1895. It is a neo-Renaissance palace on a rectangular plan with a dome at each corner and a balconied tower over the centre, its front carrying allegorical figures of Greek goddesses by the Novi Sad sculptor Julije Anika and its ceremonial hall painted by Pavle Ružička. The tower once held the fire bell Matilda, which was melted down in the war.
- Date
- 1930–1941
- Coordinates
- 45.25477, 19.84460
- Source
- Zempléni Múzeum, Szerencs - képeslapok
- Credit
- Zempléni Múzeum, Szerencs
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 2311 × 1511 px
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