A river monitor lies broadside to the camera in mid channel, low in the water with an armoured hull, a single tall funnel making heavy smoke, and a superstructure of armoured turrets and open bridge. A long boom of framework carrying a row of curved tines is rigged out from her side and floated on the surface. Crewmen stand along her deck and at the rail, several at the boom. Astern and to the left, other craft lie at moorings against a low bank. Across the middle distance the wreck of a large lattice bridge crosses the river: one span still stands high on its piers, the next has dropped at an angle into the water, and the twisted framework of a third lies collapsed beyond it. A small boat with figures aboard crosses in the left foreground and a man in a greatcoat and cap stands at the extreme right, watching from the near deck.
About this place
The Potiorek Bridge, Poćorekov most, was a road bridge over the Danube between Novi Sad and Petrovaradin from 1915 to 1924. After its defeat at Cer in August 1914 the Austro-Hungarian army needed more than the railway and pontoon bridges could carry, and built this one between December 1914 and March 1915. It never had an official name; army papers called it after Oskar Potiorek, the commander-in-chief. On the Novi Sad side it stood where Miloša Bajića street ends today, near the silk mill. Five iron arches rested on six timber piers, four in the river; the structure was 261 metres long, 384 metres in all, and 6.7 metres wide. The Serbian army entered Novi Sad across it on 9 November 1918. Ice floes brought down a pier and two arches on 18 February 1924, and the remains were dismantled that summer. This archive's photograph shows the Danube monitor Körös, rigged with a mine rake, in front of it.
On the card
Oben: S.M.S. KÖRÖS mit Minenrechen, im Hintergrund die durch Kriegseinwirkung
zerstörte Brücke von Ujvidék (heute Novi Sad).
Above: S.M.S. Koros with mine rake, in the background the bridge of Ujvidek
(today Novi Sad) destroyed by act of war.
- Date
- 1914–1918
- Coordinates
- 45.25708, 19.85696
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- unknown
- Size
- 786 × 559 px
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