The printed caption is in Hungarian and German with no Serbian, which places the card before 1918, and it names the fortress twice over, once in each, with a stop standing where a letter should be in the German form. A hand has dated the card in ink to the twenty-ninth of November 1914, which supersedes the year it was catalogued under. The lattice spans of the Franz Josef railway bridge cross the water on their masonry piers, and the craft tied up at the bank is a timber Danube lighter with a raised lookout box and a loading derrick, women in aprons handling lidded milk cans alongside it.
About this place
A Habsburg star fortress on the right bank of the Danube, built between 1692 and 1780 on a site fortified since antiquity: the Romans held Cusum here, a medieval fortress followed, and Cistercian monks kept a monastery on the hill in the 13th century. Beneath its walls Prince Eugene of Savoy defeated a far larger Ottoman army on 5 August 1716. Nicknamed the Gibraltar on the Danube, the fortress conceals some 16 kilometres of underground counter-mine galleries dug in 1764-1776. On its clock tower the hands are reversed, the long hand showing the hours so that fishermen on the Danube could read the time from a distance. Today the fortress houses the City Museum of Novi Sad and hosts the EXIT festival each summer.
On the card
Ujvidék, Pétervárad-vár, Festung Pete.wardein / 1914. XI/29
- Date
- 1914
- Coordinates
- 45.25250, 19.86250
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain (historical photograph)
- Size
- 1600 × 1018 px
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