Images3

The Floating Swimming Club House

1900s

Danubius Rowing Club

1910

The Bridge and Fortress, with a Floating Bath House Below, 1941

by May 1941 · postcard

About this place

Before Novi Sad had a proper beach, its citizens swam from floating timber baths moored in the Danube, built on rafts of logs and lashed barrels with a wooden bath house standing on the water. Serbian sources call them švimšule, a local rendering of the German Schwimmschule, meaning swimming school, and the earliest of them at the Poloj sandbar were known as Stengl's baths. They were divided into a men's and a women's side, a bathing costume came with the ticket, and order was the responsibility of the chief of police, who measured the length of skirts on the women's costumes. One such bath house stood on the water a few hundred metres upstream of Brukšanac, the small work that guarded the pontoon bridge. The baths were superseded in 1911 when Štrand opened on the Poloj sandbar as the city's official beach.