by May 1941Post Office
The Postal Directorate Building, Novi Sad
The card itself is captioned in Serbian, Novi Sad, Palata Direkcije Pošta, the Post Office Directorate Palace, while the city is named in Hungarian as Újvidék on cards of the same months; the card's May 1941 date falls only weeks after the Hungarian occupation that April, so this Yugoslav-era Serbian card was evidently still being used just after the change of administration, the mirror image of the Hungarian-to-Serbian overprints of 1918. A biplane flies over the building, with a tram and pedestrians in the street below and flowerbeds planted along the fence.
About this place
The old post office of Novi Sad closes the north-eastern side of Trg mladenaca, the former Erzsébet tér, at the corner of Narodnih heroja and Poštanska. It went up in the 1870s to an unknown design and began as a hotel: in 1889 one Jovan Horvat took over the renovated building, and the Hotel Central, Központi szálloda, probably opened then, with a coffee house on the ground floor and a garden toward the square. In 1899 it was adapted and handed to the postal service, and a card of 1907 captions it as the Royal Hungarian Post Palace in all three languages of the town. From 1922 Momir Korunović added a second floor and lengthened both wings by a third for the new Directorate of Posts and Telegraphs for Vojvodina. Dragiša Brašovan's tower of 1958 to 1962, now the New Post Office Building, was joined to it, and the post kept the older house for more than a century as the Stara pošta, the Old Post. Works have begun to make it a hotel again. This archive's pictures show it as the hotel behind its garden, as the post palace of the Habsburg years and raised by a storey after 1922.
On the card
Нови Сад, Палата Дирекције Пошта. / Novi Sad, Palata Direkcije Pošta. / ДИРЕКЦИЈА ПОШТА И ТЕЛЕГРАФА / DIREKCIJA POŠTA, TELEGRAFA
Novi Sad, the palace of the Directorate of Posts. Directorate of Posts and Telegraphs, lettered on the building in Cyrillic and Latin.
- Date
- by May 1941
- Coordinates
- 45.25279, 19.84262
- Source
- Zempléni Múzeum, Szerencs - képeslapok
- Credit
- Zempléni Múzeum, Szerencs
- Licence
- Public domain
- Size
- 2411 × 1546 px
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