The silk mill on its unmade road: a two-storey brick house with shuttered windows and a boarded fence at the left, and beyond it the long low sheds of the works with a tall round chimney rising between them. Workers stand at the shed doors and a man walks along the fence in the foreground.
About this place
The Royal Hungarian silk filature at Novi Sad was one of a chain of mills built under the state silk programme that Pál Bezerédj ran from 1880, alongside works at Pančevo, Tolna, Győr, Komárom, Novi Kneževac, Mohács, Békéscsaba and Lugoj. The programme lifted the country's annual cocoon crop from a few tonnes to two thousand, and by 1905 Hungary stood third in Europe for silk after Italy and France. The mills employed women and girls, and the postcard here shows the whole workforce of the Novi Sad house drawn up in the yard in headscarves and aprons; a hostel for those who came from outside the town was opened in Novi Sad in 1914. Silk settled in the Almaš quarter of Podbara, where the works were known as the Svilara and the dye house was reckoned the largest silk factory in Hungary. The trade lasted in the quarter into the 1970s, tall blocks of flats went up on the factory ground in the 1960s, and one surviving building now serves as a cultural centre.
On the card
НОВИ САД, Свилара / NOVI SAD, Svilara
Novi Sad. Silk mill.
- Date
- after 1918
- Coordinates
- 45.26256, 19.84965
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 1347 × 866 px
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