The house on the water is not timber but rendered, two storeys on a pontoon hull with a railed open deck over its roof, balconies along the river face and flagstaffs at the corners, and racing shells are stowed on trestles on the raft moored alongside, so what floats here is a club house rather than a bathing crib. Behind it stands a small baroque church with a volute gable and a slender bell tower, with a low embanked road and a white railing beyond it and a factory chimney smoking further off.
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 The baths were superseded in 1911 when Štrand opened on the Poloj sandbar as the city's official beach.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
- 1900s
- Coordinates
- 45.25448, 19.85503
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 600 × 352 px
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