A view taken from the deck of a pontoon bridge, looking along its length toward the far bank. The roadway is carried on a line of heavy timber barges moored bow to stern, their gunwales just clear of the water and their mooring chains running down into it, with a plank carriageway above and a light timber handrail on either side. Two men in dark coats and hats stand on the decking in the middle distance and figures are strung out along the crossing beyond them. On the right the timbers of an opening span are drawn back over a heavier framework. Across the water the wooded escarpment of Petrovaradin rises with the fortress spread along its top, its long ranges under red roofs and its clock tower standing at the point, and at the left a church spire and roofs show among the trees of the lower town.
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.
- Date
- 1898–1918
- Coordinates
- 45.25463, 19.85729
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- unknown
- Size
- 710 × 454 px
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