The votive column with its cross and sunburst finial stands at the center of Ferenc József tér as an electric tram crosses behind it, trolley pole raised to the wire. Two nuns in black habits walk past a handcart loaded with goods, while other pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages fill the square. The Első Magyar insurance company building stands at right beneath striped shop awnings. The caption is printed in Hungarian and German.
About this place
The largest monument the main square ever carried, and it is gone. A Catholic Holy Trinity column in the Central European tradition of Trinity and plague columns, put up in 1781 and associated locally with protection from plague. On 25 July 1781 the city moved the public market scale off the square because the Catholic community intended to raise the stone monument there, the square then still working as the Great Market. It was built of stone, hard limestone and red marble, in several sculptural levels, and it was significantly restored in 1866. Published heights differ, roughly 15 to 20 metres. The sculptor is not securely identified, much of the documentation having been lost when Novi Sad was destroyed in 1849.
Its imagery combined Catholic devotion with Hungarian and Habsburg politics: St Stephen of Hungary, St Ladislaus, Emperor Leopold I, the Virgin Mary, St Paul and St Teresa of Avila, with the Holy Trinity in the upper composition. After 1918 the Austro-Hungarian heraldry was reportedly altered, and again under the Hungarian occupation from 1941. It stood through the Austro-Hungarian period, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the war, and it predates the church beside it: the present Church of the Name of Mary went up in 1892 to 1895, so in most photographs here the monument is the oldest thing in the frame. It was dismantled by the post-war authorities in the late 1940s, usually dated 1947 or 1948, one stated reason being to clear the square for large gatherings. What became of the pieces is not conclusively documented; several later accounts move them to Telep, one to the grounds of St Elizabeth's church there, another into construction material.
It stood on Trg slobode between the Town Hall and the Church of the Name of Mary, about 35 m from the church.
It is easily confused with the Epiphany Cross, a separate and much smaller monument with its own entry here. In a photograph, the column has no railing round it, and carries clouds, cherub heads, standing statues at its corners and garland swags, with a cross at its apex. The cross stands inside an iron railing with lamps at the corners, on a pedestal with a plain oval medallion, and its top is a bare crucifix. The column never left the square; the cross moved in 1910.