A tram fitted with a diamond shaped bow collector runs along a bare earth trackbed beside heavily pollarded trees, while a woman and two children walk away down a gravel path to the right. A printed caption beneath the photograph reads in Cyrillic that this shows the tram beside Futoški Park in the middle of the twentieth century. No cobbles or asphalt cover the roadway the tram rides on.
About this place
Futoški park covers about eight hectares on Futoška street and was cut in the first decade of the twentieth century out of the old woodland that ran west from Novi Sad towards Futog. It was made as a setting for the Iodine Spa rather than as an ordinary public garden, and the surviving 1907 plan of the Hungarian landscape architect Ármin Petz the Younger can still be read in the layout. Several geothermal springs rise in the ground here, and seven wells have been sunk in and around the park, all to much the same depth and all yielding water of the same composition. The planting mixes native lowland oak, white poplar and elm with imported liquidambar, sophora, black walnut and magnolia; the old plane in front of the spa building and two tulip trees, the oldest recorded in any public green space in the city, are the notable specimens. The spa buildings and their immediate surroundings were listed in 1986 as a cultural monument of great importance, so that park and spa are protected together.