Images2

Đačko igralište from the air

1936–1941

The Štrand waterworks during the 1965 flood

1965, during the Danube flood

About this place

A school sports ground of three hectares laid out on the raw ground of Mali Liman and opened on 31 May 1936. The initiative came from Mirko Balubdžić, director of the Novi Sad gymnasium, and the work was carried out by the First Boys' Real Gymnasium of King Alexander I together with the Home and School Community and the Hygiene Institute, with pupils giving voluntary labour. The engineer Milutin Tatić and the architect Milorad Radonić designed it on the model of a ground in Zagreb, and Franjo Horvat laid out its botanical planting. It had a kept grass field for mass gymnastic displays and for the throwing events, a circular running track of 333 metres that was flooded as a skating rink in winter, run ups for the jumps, stands for as many as five thousand, a keeper's house, changing rooms and an open air amphitheatre for lectures, with a rest and recovery building for pupils and courts for tennis, volleyball and basketball alongside. Poplars were planted around the perimeter as a screen against the košava wind and quickly became the mark of the place; they are visible in the archive's aerial view. Its equipment came from the German firm Berg and no other school ground in the country had the like, which is why the years from 1936 to 1941 are called its golden age. It is among the oldest sporting grounds in Novi Sad, it has never changed use, and FK Indeks plays there now.