1929–1939Town Hall
The Town Hall, a tram and horse cabs on the square
The Town Hall stands behind a screen of clipped trees across the main square, its arcaded first floor and heavy cornice carrying the clock tower that still marks the square, with a tall street lamp at the left. A four-wheel tram waits in the roadway with its pole up, horse cabs are drawn up along the kerb, a woman pushes a handcart across the foreground, and a lorry and a crowd fill the right of the square. The caption calls the building Banska palata, the Ban's palace. The administration of the Danube Banovina, created in 1929, had its offices in the Town Hall until Dragiša Brašovan's palace on the boulevard was finished in 1939, so the label dates the card to those years.
About this place
The Town Hall, still known in Novi Sad as the Magistrat, stands on Trg slobode opposite the Catholic church and has housed the city government for more than a century. The office dates from 1748, when the settlement then called the Petrovaradin Trench was raised to a free royal city, but for its first century and a half the magistracy rented one building after another around the town. Where the new house should stand was fought over: Svetozar Miletić and his supporters wanted it in the quarter where the Serbs lived, the Catholics wanted it on the main square facing their church, and the Catholics won. György Molnár, who took no fee for the work, revised his plans several times and looked partly to the town hall at Graz; Karl Lerer and Jožef Cocek built it between 1893 and 1895. It is a neo-Renaissance palace on a rectangular plan with a dome at each corner and a balconied tower over the centre, its front carrying allegorical figures of Greek goddesses by the Novi Sad sculptor Julije Anika and its ceremonial hall painted by Pavle Ružička. The tower once held the fire bell Matilda, which was melted down in the war.
On the card
Нови Сад, Банска палата. / Novi Sad, Banska palata.
Novi Sad, the Ban's Palace.
- Date
- 1929–1939
- Coordinates
- 45.25477, 19.84460
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 1625 × 1047 px
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