A page from a German book set in Fraktur, opening the chapter on the Bácska, so the region was being described to a German-reading public inside the Hungarian kingdom. The upper plate is signed in the block by the engraver Morelli and the tall plate down the side by Cserna, and that second plate follows the pontoon bridge out across the Danube on its floats with people walking over it. The text gives the Bácska as an 11,079 square kilometre plain between the lower Danube and the Tisza, running from Baja and Maria-Theresiopel to Neusatz, forming the united counties of Bács-Bodrog, and notes that the name came into use in the Turkish period and appears in the Karlowitz peace instrument of 1699.
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.
On the card
Die Bácska / Neusatz, von Peterwardein gesehen / MORELLI G.F.I.MK.s / Cserna
- Date
- 1883
- Coordinates
- 45.25463, 19.85729
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 1364 × 2000 px
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