Images5

Novi Sad and Petrovaradin site map, Danube gauge register, dual scale

1894–1895 · map

Workers at the Royal Hungarian Silk Mill

1900–1908

The silk mill and its chimney

after 1918 · postcard

Textile Factory (Kosovo Street)

1955

The Coloseum circus pitched by the silk mill

1965

About this place

The Royal Hungarian silk filature at Novi Sad was one of a chain of mills built under the state silk programme that Pál Bezerédj ran from 1880, alongside works at Pančevo, Tolna, Győr, Komárom, Novi Kneževac, Mohács, Békéscsaba and Lugoj. The programme lifted the country's annual cocoon crop from a few tonnes to two thousand, and by 1905 Hungary stood third in Europe for silk after Italy and France. The mills employed women and girls, and the postcard here shows the whole workforce of the Novi Sad house drawn up in the yard in headscarves and aprons; a hostel for those who came from outside the town was opened in Novi Sad in 1914. Silk settled in the Almaš quarter of Podbara, where the works were known as the Svilara and the dye house was reckoned the largest silk factory in Hungary. The trade lasted in the quarter into the 1970s, tall blocks of flats went up on the factory ground in the 1960s, and one surviving building now serves as a cultural centre.