Source: RAVNOPLOV Published: 31.05.2018 Link: https://www.ravnoplov.rs/veliki-backi-kanal/

HISTORY, HORIZONS OF THE PAST, PLAIN PALL ET, NATURE OF THE PL AIN GREAT BAČKA CANAL

31/05/2018

The digging of the Great Bačka Canal was one of the most significant endeavours in the history of , as well as of Bačka. The canal was particularly important for regulating water levels in the urban area, especially in arable land, pastures and meadows. Its excavation significantly reduced the number of ponds, marshes, oxbow lakes, small lakes and small rivers that, occasionally or permanently, threatened the land in the area of the town and surrounding settlements. As a result, the continuing threats of malaria infectious diseases that had often devastated the local population and domestic animals for decades and centuries were significantly diminished. At the same time, the canal was also used to irrigate the surrounding land area during dry periods. The canal was of particular importance to the economy of the town because agricultural products were transported far easier, faster, safer and cheaper than before. By 1918, the canal officially bore the name of the Austrian Emperor Franz I, by whose approval it was dug. Later, between the two world wars, it was named after King Peter I, and after World War II the official name was the Great Bačka Canal.

The first idea to excavate the canal and connect it to the Mostonga River near Sombor with the to shorten navigation came from Sombor Senator and Mayor Josip Jozo Marković, who in 1768 proposed to the Hungarian Chamber of Commerce to dig a canal from the Danube riverbed to Mostonga near Sombor. The Mostonga River was at that time navigable during the summer months, especially in June and July, but from mid-18th century it has dried up in the summer months. Although he had pointed out all the benefits of this endeavour, the Chamber's administration did not accept Marković's proposal.

What the Sombor Senator didn't manage to succeed in was accomplished a quarter of the century later, and to a much greater extent, by the brothers József and Gábor Kiss. The Kiss brothers were descended from a Hungarian-speaking noble family of officers. They attended the Military Academy of Engineering in Vienna, after which, during 1768, they went on a study visit to England. József Kiss soon left the army and became an inventor of the Royal Chamber. He worked on the regulation of the Danube near Pozsony (Bratislava) and Mohács, as well as in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce. In the late 70s of the 18th century, as a royal chamber engineer, mathematician and hydraulic engineer, he moved to Bačka and settled in . He became an official of the Bačka Chamber Administration, whose headquarters were in Sombor. At the beginning of the 80s of the 18 century, Kiss worked on the colonization of the German population (land parceling and construction of typical settlements). His engineering office was located in Sombor, from where he travelled to Bačka to maintain the waterways and produce maps. At the same time, he designed churches, mills, inns, warehouses, roads, bridges, dykes and smaller navigable sewers and drains, and drafted a new building for Sombor Town Hall, which remained unfulfilled. From 1788 he was appointed Chief Engineer of the Bačka Chamber Administration.

József Kiss, engineer, designer of the Great Bačka Canal

On 12 December 1791, the Kiss Brothers submitted to the Emperor Leopold II a detailed proposal for the excavation of the canal between the Danube and Tisa, with an overview of costs and sketches. As the Emperor Leopold passed away the following year, his successor, Emperor Franz I agreed to entrust the construction of the canal to a privileged joint stock company at the end of March 1793, and the first works began already in May the same year. The Kiss brothers signed a contract with a joint stock company, were appointed canal directors, which was to remain in the Kiss' family inheritance, and were promised one-third of the net profit as well as ten first-class shares each worth 5,000 forints. Sombor was designated as the seat of the Privileged Hungarian Royal Shipping Company, which was the official name of the joint stock company, which had a fixed capital of 800,000 forints. The shareholders of this company were some of the most affluent people in at the time.

The plan of the route of the would be canal, made by the Kiss brothers in 1792

Map of the Franz (Great Bačka) Canal made by the brothers József and Gábor Kiss in the mid-90s of the 18th century

The 110-kilometer-long canal, according to the Kiss brothers’ plan, was to connect the Danube and Tisa, from Monostor to Feldwar (Backo Gradište). The original plan of the Kiss brothers envisaged that the canal would run from the Danube at Apatin, but this idea was abandoned. With this canal the water route would have been shortened by 158 km from Monostor to Feldwar and the travelling time downstream reduced by ten days and upstream by twenty days.

Plan of the initial part of the canal with the old lock near Monoštor (1822)

The construction of the canal was the largest construction effort in Europe at the time, with between two and four thousand workers constantly working on excavation, which occasionally included prisoners of war from the Austrian wars with France as well as county prisoners. The excavation, especially near Sombor, encountered great difficulties because of the underwater terrain. For part of the canal route near Sombor (between Apatin Bridge and Bukovac Vodice) the old Mostonga River bed was also used, which was four to six meters deep.

Due to considerable difficulties, the construction costs soon exceeded the original plans, so the project managers, engineers József and Gábor Kiss, were therefore dismissed from duty in 1797, as well as due to several of their poor decisions and estimates (by the end of construction the costs had more than tripled the originally projected 902,000 Viennese forints). Nine years after the construction began, the canal was ceremoniously handed over for use in early May 1802 (the designer of the canal, engineer József Kiss, was not even invited to the opening ceremony). The Austrian Emperor Franz I, whose name the canal bore, visited it five years later (in 1807) when he boarded a decorated boat in Sombor which took him to Vrbas via the canal.

Sombor 1818

For the further economic development of Sombor and a greater part of Bačka, the Franz Canal had immeasurable importance. According to Antal Mindszenti, who visited Sombor around 1830, the goods were transported via the Franz Canal, using ships coming from the north, with the help of which Sombor merchants were selling grain at a considerable profit because, apart from the possible rental cost of the barns, they did not have any transport costs and customers would come 'to their feet'. Mindszenti also said that there were few cities across the country that could have traded with such profits as Sombor, and stated that the Franz Canal contributed greatly to the development of the town. The town, he said, had planned to dig another smaller canal, which would lead from the Franz Canal to the interior of the town so that boats could transport grain to larger merchant ships, which would be moored in the Franz Canal. This would have further reduced the cost of transporting grain, which was then transported for about half an hour by truck. This canal was to enter the town at the town's gate on Road, from where it would pass along the fair next to the County building (where the main dock was to be built), and then go via Venac to the Royal Chamber of Commerce grain warehouse behind Grassalkovich Palace, and from there, along Apatin Road (then Canal Street), to the Franz Canal. The canal in the town was to be ten grabs wide (around 19 meters), and 14 grabs (around 27 meters) outside the town, and for its dig it was necessary to provide around 120,000 forints. Although the town accepted this idea, Mindszenti noted that during his stay in Sombor he saw not even the slightest preparations for the realization of this intent. Earlier, according to Mindszenti, the county's authorities had drawn up a plan to drain the wetlands in the north of Sombor village settlement, which extended all the way to , and thus increase the water level in the Franz Canal.

The Franz (Great Bačka) Canal near Sombor, near the bridge on the Apatin road in 1903 (above) and in 1906 (below) Through the canal, during the first decades of its existence, between 70 and 80 thousand tons of goods (cereals, hay, cattle, salt, wine, tobacco, food, groceries, wood and coal, sand, construction material, metals, convenience goods, etc) were transported annually on about one thousand ships. Between 1826 and 1839, 6,766 loaded and 5,159 empty ships were transported by the canal near Sombor, and the weight of the goods transported was 18 million Viennese cents (weight measure 56 kg) i.e. over one million tons, which best illustrates the economic importance of this waterway. (Thirty years later, between 1856 and 1868, 8,262 loaded and 6273 empty ships sailed through the canal, as well as 3985 rafts, and 27.7 million of Viennese cents worth of goods were transported). The ships and longboats were towed by the horses that went along the canal coast, i.e. the dirt track by the canal, and the horse stables were located along certain parts of the waterway, starting at the sluice ('slajza') near Monostor (later from ).

Horses towing a boat

In 1827, the joint stock company offered to hand the running of the Franz Canal over to the state chamber administration, free of charge, because the costs of maintaining it had become too big (in 1819 the first canal dredger was built, which used human labor force). Due to silt, the canal was often not navigable on certain sections. The state took over the canal only in 1842, and in the following years it became navigable again on its entire course, and for this purpose the steamer 'Otter' was purchased in 1846 in England, which was capable of dredging the shallow watercourse more effectively.

Due to a major change in the flow of the Danube near Batina and Bački Monoštor and the breaking of the wooden sluice in 1830 in Monoštor, as well as its frequent blockage with silt, the state began the construction of a new branch of the canal in 1846, leading from the Danube across Batina (not far from Bezdan) to Bački Monoštor. During 1855 and 1856, the first concrete sluice in Europe was built here, which represented a new entrance to the Franz Canal. On that occasion, an inscription in Latin was made on the wall of the lock on a marble slab, which (translated by Sanja Stepanović into Serbian) reads: To Franz Joseph I, the Emperor, happily ruling, this dam, the only one in Europe made of concrete, under the auspices of the Minister of Trade of Knight of Toggenburg and Governor Coronini Cronberg, was built by the imperial-royal commissioner and supervisor Johannes Mihalik in 1855 and 1856). It has long been claimed, almost like an urban myth, that the lock was designed and built by Gustav Eiffel (who was only 23 years old at the time), but its designer and builder was an imperial engineer Johannes Mihalik.

Following the construction of the new lock, vessels of up to 62 meters long, with a draft of up to two meters, could be navigated in the Sombor Canal basin at regular water levels. In 1851, a special Directorate of the Franz Canal was established, and the Land Construction Directorate in Timisoara was in charge of technical maintenance. At the same time, the canal was also dug from Bačko Gradište to Bečej, so its total length on the Bezdan - Bečej stretch was increased to 123 km. There were a total of five ship locks on the canal (Bezdan, Mali , Vrbas, Szentomás or Srbobran and Beéej). The great lock in Beéej was built between 1895 and 1899.

Map of the excavation of the new initial route of the canal of 1846, which ran from the Danube near Batina and Bezdan, to the old lock near Monoštor An inscription on a marble slab in the wall of the lock near Bezdan

The Bezdan lock - the beginning of the Great Bačka Canal, 1904.

The importance of the canal for freight transport declined somewhat after the construction of the railway in 1869, but it still presented the cheapest way to transport large quantities of agricultural products and construction material for decades. At the end of the 60s of the 19 century, the state found that its canal business was devoid of commercial flexibility due to a variety of different interests (navigation, irrigation, drainage, use of water power, fishing), and decided to lease the canal to an entrepreneur who would, with the state material support, renew it. The engineer István Türr, a naturalized Briton of Hungarian descent, born in Baja, accepted the job, who was a builder of the Corinth Canal in Greece and a close friend and associate of the builder of the Suez Canal Ferdinand Lesseps. Türr persuaded English investors to invest one million pounds sterling into the reparation and upgrading of the canal, so that the Franz Canal was ceded in 1870, for a period of 75 years, to the London joint stock company Wythes & Longridge, and 28% of the total value of shares went to Austrian shareholders. In the following five years, the canal was completely renovated (the riverbed was deepened through its entire course), and a new water supply canal was built, of the same dimensions, 47 km long, from Baja to Bezdan, where it was connected to the Franz Canal. From Mali Stapar, a 69 km long branch of the Franz Canal to was built, which was intended primarily for irrigation of large areas of state land. Land improvement works on the canal near Sombor between the Sonćan and Sivac bridge were carried out in 1875. And half a century later, in the interwar period (1918-1941), the former Franz Canal was still the largest investment of the English capital in the Kingdom of , and its concession expired, symbolically, in 1945.

The Great Bačka Canal near Bezdan, at the beginning of the 20th century

The canal at Sombor 1909

The ship lock on the canal, second half of the 20th century The Canal at Mali Stapar, near Sivac (with the kindness of Zoran Rajić)

Swimmer on the sluice at Mali Stapar (with the kindness of Zoran Rajić) From 1886, the Rules of Shipping on the Franz Canal were adopted, and from 1893, the port on the canal, which was located near the bridge on the Apatin Road, was connected to the town by a telephone line. The canal was also useful for the people of Sombor in winter when the canal froze, as Sombor icebreakers would remove a thousand carts of ice from there and store it in special ice containers, stored under the ground and kept in straw until the summer months, when it was sold to caterers and citizens. In the immediate vicinity of the Franz Canal in 1905, the town Power Plant was finished and started operating. In 1906, the canal administration owned 582 acres of land in the Sombor area. According to the data for 1913, 4,184 ships sailed through the Franz Canal during that year, carrying cargo of 432,196 tons of various goods. The canal functioned flawlessly until the beginning of the First World War, when, due to the war, it was brought to the brink of ruin - the professional staff who maintained the canal went to war, the army confiscated the canal vessels for war purposes, and soon they deteriorated, its regular maintenance (dredging) of the canal also stopped, and the inventory and material goods were looted.

A wooden bridge over the canal in , at the beginning of the 20th century

The canal near Kule, in the 30s of the 20th century

The ship lock on the canal in Novi Vrbas, 1941 The bridge on the canal at Torszá (today Savino Selo) near Vrbas, 1913

Completion of the canal and locks near the Tisa River in Bečej, 1914

After the First World War, the Baja Canal, the main source of water supply for the Franz Canal, remained in Hungary on most of its course (30 km), which was initially a significant problem because it was not in Hungary's interest to dredge and maintain the Danube canal entrance near Baja. After long negotiations with the Hungarian side, water supply to the canal was resolved by an agreement of 23 October 1930. During the 15 post-war years, the concessionaires and 'Kanal Kralja Petra AD Sombor' invested more than ten million dinars in the maintenance of the canal, its banks and piers. According to data from 1931, the canal was used for traffic, which annually accounted for more than 10% of the total state exports of the (the canal exported 31,000 tons of wheat, 40,000 tons of sugar beet and 9,000 tons of corn, as well as significant amounts of wood, coal and sand). In the following years, the share of goods exported via the canal increased even more. Along the entire course of the canal, the Danube barges with a carrying capacity of 60 wagons sailed without difficulty, and due to the slow flow of the canal water, one tugboat was able to tow a larger number of vessels. Nevertheless, even in the best interwar years, the canal traffic was many times lower than before the First World War (in 1921 the canal transported 166,234 tons of various goods, in 1924, 213,610 tons, in 1927, 158,812 tons, in 1929,133,621 tons, in 1935, 138,410, and in 1936, 175,445 tons of goods).

The Great Bačka Canal near Sombor and the beach “Štrand” in Sombor, in the early 1940s of the 20th century At the end of the thirties of the 20th century, next to the canal, first in Sombor, the construction of a silo was supposed to start, but the war stopped this endeavour. Significant industrial facilities were operating right next to the canal (sugar factories in Sivac, Crvenka and Vrbas, cloth and leather factories in Kula, a significant number of municipal hemp factories and mills). Large areas of land were irrigated with water from the canal, and inland waters from many surrounding agricultural estates and water cooperatives were drained into the canal. The Great Bačka Canal was nationalized immediately after the end of the Second World War, and it was deepened and widened again on the section between Bezdan and Sombor in 1957. With the development of new modes of transport, the traffic importance of the Great Bačka Canal in the previous half century has been significantly reduced.

The Great Bačka Canal in the mid-20th century

Unfortunately, today the Great Bačka Canal is polluted from its middle course, near Crvenka and Kula, and especially in Vrbas, where for more than 30 years all municipal and industrial wastewater has been flowing into the canal without any prior processing. Pollution is so widespread that there are no more living organisms in this part of the canal (experts from the Faculty of Sciences of Novi Sad calculated that the pollution coefficient of the Grand Bačka Canal near Vrbas is about a thousand times higher than in the Danube near Novi Sad or Belgrade, and there is a special danger in the silt, the amount of sediment and the concentration of toxic substances). This part of the canal is considered to be the most polluted watercourse in Europe. Unlike the middle course of the canal, its upper course, from Bezdan to Monoštor, near Sombor all the way to Crvenka, is still clean, unpolluted, with healthy water and rich flora and fauna.

The Great Bačka Canal near Sombor in spring, summer, autumn and winter (photos by: Milan Stepanović)

With the construction of the canal, six wooden bridges were built on its course near Sombor (towards , Apatin, , Stapar, near Žarkovac village settlement and near Matarić-Salas in the area of Gradina village settlement). The closest to the people of Sombor was a large wooden bridge leading to Apatin (there is information about its repair between 1862 and 1866 that took several days), and which was replaced by a metal structure in 1886 and had a bridgehead made of brick. During the retreat in 1941, the Yugoslav army mined and demolished the Apatin bridge (as well as most other bridges on the canal - the railway bridge to Kupusina and Apatin, the railway bridge to Vinkovci, Švrakina bridge and the wooden bridge in Rokovci), and the Hungarian occupation authorities rebuilt it from the same material in 1942. Under the weight of a large truck, the old Apatin bridge collapsed in 1961, so that, by the end of 1964, a modern bridge was built on its place, which is still used today.

On the banks of the Great Bačka Canal from the middle of the 19th century there were favorite beaches and picnic areas of the residents of Sombor – “Kupalište kod Kruške” (Bathing area at the pear; on the left side of the bridge towards Apatin) and “Štrand” (on the right side of the bridge), and the canal eventually became a fishing area for many town fishermen. Some of the most beautiful Sombor restaurants today are directly connected to the canal banks (“De Sol”, “Andrić”, “Slon”). For Sombor, the canal has become a substitute for the non-existent, missing Mostonga River and its natural environment still makes up the great ecological wealth of the town's immediate surroundings.

The town beach “Štrand” on the Grand Bačka Canal near Sombor in the 1930s of the 20th century

Contemplative fishing on the Sombor Canal, the beginning of the second half of the 20th century Calm water … (photo by: Rajko R. Karišić)

Anchored until spring (photo by: Ružica Parčetić)

Milan Stepanović