A wood-engraved plate of Petrovaradin seen from the Danube, from a book. The fortress fills the sheet: the upper barracks along the crest, the bare rock falling to the water, waterfront cottages at its edge. A paddle steamer crosses the foreground. The plate is lettered only PETERWARDEIN, the fortress's German name, which is how an English readership met the place. It illustrates Edmund Spencer's "Turkey, Russia, the Black Sea, and Circassia", published in London in 1855, a travel narrative written after the fighting of 1848. No artist or engraver is named on the plate, so the book's author should not be taken as its maker.
About this place
A Habsburg star fortress on the right bank of the Danube, built between 1692 and 1780 on a site fortified since antiquity: the Romans held Cusum here, a medieval fortress followed, and Cistercian monks kept a monastery on the hill in the 13th century. Beneath its walls Prince Eugene of Savoy defeated a far larger Ottoman army on 5 August 1716. Nicknamed the Gibraltar on the Danube, the fortress conceals some 16 kilometres of underground counter-mine galleries dug in 1764-1776. On its clock tower the hands are reversed, the long hand showing the hours so that fishermen on the Danube could read the time from a distance. The fortress still stands over the river and houses the City Museum of Novi Sad.
- Date
- 1855
- Coordinates
- 45.25250, 19.86250
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 3998 × 2642 px
Open on the full map ›