Images4

Greetings from Petrovaradin: the Church of Our Lady of the Snows

1896–1918 · postcard

The Overgrown Church of Our Lady of the Snows, Petrovaradin, 1915

1915

A Hand-Tinted View of Our Lady of the Snows, near Petrovaradin, 1918

by August 1918 · postcard

Our Lady of Tekije, dated by hand in October 1932

4 October 1932

About this place

The pilgrimage church of Our Lady of the Snows stands at Tekije, on the road from Petrovaradin to Sremski Karlovci. Its name comes from the tekke, a dervish lodge, that the Ottomans built here in the sixteenth century beside a wooden mosque; the Jesuits later turned the abandoned mosque into a chapel. Prince Eugene of Savoy defeated the Ottoman army at Vezirac on 5 August 1716, the feast of Our Lady of the Snows, and gave the chapel a picture of the Virgin and Child, and the church has borne that dedication since. It was enlarged at the expense of the family of Count Siegfried Breuner, executed by the Ottomans on the day of the battle, and again by the Jesuits in 1754. Its present form dates from 1881, when the abbot Ilija Okrugić had it rebuilt and enlarged to plans by the Zagreb architect Hermann Bollé. Its great pilgrimage falls on 5 August. This archive's postcards show its twin west towers and the domed drum at its rear.