A large biplane fills the frame inside a corrugated-iron hangar, its twin tail fins each marked with a large dark cross, the military insignia of the period. Skylights in the hangar roof throw bright rectangles of light behind the aircraft's rigging and wing struts. The photograph documents the city's wartime airfield in 1917.
About this place
Novi Sad's military airfield lay on the western edge of the city, on the flat ground at Sajlovo that later took the name Jugovićevo. The city ceded the land in 1912 at the request of the Austro-Hungarian general staff and the field opened with a flying meeting in May 1913, at first no more than grass strips and eleven wooden hangars, with brick hangars, workshops and barracks following in 1916. A Serbian squadron flew in from France in November 1918, and for the next two decades the field was the centre of military aviation in the new Yugoslav state, home of the first pilot school, of training schools for reserve officers, observers and mechanics, and of the air force command until it moved to Zemun in 1936; it was renamed in 1927 after the aviation officer Jovan Jugović. German bombers struck it in April 1941, the occupiers laid an 800 metre concrete runway, and after the war the field lost its purpose as the city grew over it, leaving Jugovićevo as the name of a residential district.