Images8

Novi Sad across the Danube, with the pontoon bridge

by November 1900 · postcard

Greetings from Novi Sad on the Danube, 1900

by November 1900 · postcard

The Floating Swimming Club House

1900s

St John of Nepomuk Chapel at the Neusatz landing

1914–1918

Building the bridge, the chapel still standing

1923

Crowds on the new bridge approach

1928

The new bridge going up below the fortress

around 1928

Chapel of St John of Nepomuk at Mostobran

1928

About this place

A small Baroque Roman Catholic chapel that stood on the Novi Sad bank of the Danube inside Mostobran, the bridgehead fortification also known as Brukšanac. It was dedicated to John of Nepomuk, patron of boatmen and of those in danger on the water, which is why a chapel to him sat at a river crossing. Sources place it there from the middle of the 18th century, one giving 1759. It was a modest single nave building with an onion domed bell tower over its front, standing among the sheds, walled yards and timber gangways of the landing where the Danube steamers moored. The chapel went when the fortification went: the ramparts, ditches, gates and barracks of Mostobran were cleared as the city expanded toward the river after the First World War, and the chapel itself was pulled down in 1928 during the building of the approaches to the Prince Tomislav Bridge. A local tradition holds that a tunnel once linked it to the church of St George in Petrovaradin on the far bank. Nothing of it stands today. The pin is the OpenStreetMap point for the Novi Sad approach of the crossing, near the Kej žrtava racije end of today's Varadin Bridge, because the chapel's own footprint has not been georeferenced.