Captioned Ujvidék with Látkép - Totale, Hungarian and German for the general view, and hand-coloured in a strong flat blue. The individual pontoons can be counted in a long row under the roadway, which runs unbroken from a timber ramp on the near bank to a landing at the far end, with no span drawn aside for river traffic. A barge with a low roof lies moored beside it, and the town shows three church towers above its roofs with long white ranges along the tree line.
About this place
Before any permanent bridge stood here, Novi Sad and Petrovaradin were joined by a wooden pontoon bridge laid across the Danube on oak floats. Crossings of this kind were used from the late seventeenth century, and the first standing bridge dates from 1788; it was known as Hagen's bridge after the officer, Baron von Hagen, who designed it on the model of one at Mannheim. It was laid each spring by the pontonier unit stationed at Petrovaradin and taken up again before the first ice, and its middle section could be drawn aside to let river traffic through. Carts paid a toll while anything carried by hand went free, residents of the two towns crossed without charge, and the season opened every year with a handshake between the mayor of Novi Sad and the commandant of the fortress. The bridge was removed for the last time in 1918, when work began on the permanent crossing that became the Prince Tomislav bridge.
- Date
- 1917
- Coordinates
- 45.25463, 19.85729
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain (historical photograph)
- Size
- 962 × 626 px
Open on the full map ›