A circus stands on open waste ground under a white sky. Its big top is a broad low tent of pale canvas rising to two masts, guyed out on long ropes to pegs in the bare earth, with the show's name painted in large letters across the canvas above the entrance. A smaller tent stands behind it. On either side of the entrance a living wagon is drawn up, each a long box van on wheels with windows and a stove pipe, and a low picket fence and a handbill board close the gap between them. Behind the tent a long three storey block with regular windows runs across the frame at the left, and to the right lower industrial buildings and a tall factory chimney stand against the sky. The foreground is rutted mud and patches of old snow, with a leafless bush and a fence post at the right.
About this place
The Royal Hungarian silk filature at Novi Sad was one of a chain of mills built under the state silk programme that Pál Bezerédj ran from 1880, alongside works at Pančevo, Tolna, Győr, Komárom, Novi Kneževac, Mohács, Békéscsaba and Lugoj. The programme lifted the country's annual cocoon crop from a few tonnes to two thousand, and by 1905 Hungary stood third in Europe for silk after Italy and France. The mills employed women and girls, and the postcard here shows the whole workforce of the Novi Sad house drawn up in the yard in headscarves and aprons; a hostel for those who came from outside the town was opened in Novi Sad in 1914. Silk settled in the Almaš quarter of Podbara, where the works were known as the Svilara and the dye house was reckoned the largest silk factory in Hungary. The trade lasted in the quarter into the 1970s, tall blocks of flats went up on the factory ground in the 1960s, and one surviving building now serves as a cultural centre.
- Date
- 1965
- Coordinates
- 45.26256, 19.84965
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- unknown
- Size
- 720 × 444 px
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