The club name and year are written on in blue ink rather than printed, so the identification comes from an owner's hand and not from a publisher. Four men in white rowing kit, one of them in a dark club blazer, are running a fine-lined racing shell out over the end of a timber landing stage, its outriggers and sliding seats visible along the hull. Moored off the bank behind them is a long float planked up to head height on its rafts, one of the river bath houses the town swam from before Štrand opened, with a steam launch beyond it.
About this place
Before Novi Sad had a proper beach, its citizens swam from floating timber baths moored in the Danube, built on rafts of logs and lashed barrels with a wooden bath house standing on the water. Serbian sources call them švimšule, a local rendering of the German Schwimmschule, meaning swimming school, and the earliest of them at the Poloj sandbar were known as Stengl's baths. They were divided into a men's and a women's side, a bathing costume came with the ticket, and order was the responsibility of the chief of police, who measured the length of skirts on the women's costumes. One such bath house stood on the water a few hundred metres upstream of Brukšanac, the small work that guarded the pontoon bridge. The baths were superseded in 1911 when Štrand opened on the Poloj sandbar as the city's official beach.
- Date
- 1910
- Coordinates
- 45.25448, 19.85503
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain (historical photograph)
- Size
- 1488 × 2008 px
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