Small Bridge is a steel

Steel

Steel is an alloy that consists mostly of iron and has a carbon content between 0.2% and 2.1% by weight, depending on the grade. Carbon is the most common alloying material for iron, but various other alloying elements are used, such as manganese, chromium, vanadium, and tungsten...

 bridge in Zrenjanin

Zrenjanin

Zrenjanin is a city and municipality located in the eastern part of Serbian province of Vojvodina. It is the administrative centre of the Central Banat District of Serbia...

, Serbia

Serbia

Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...

.

Name

In Serbian, the bridge is known as Мали мост or Mali most, in Hungarian as Kishid, and in German as Kleine Brücke.

The wooden bridge

The current steel bridge was preceded by a wooden bridge in the same location. The old wooden bridge was built after a great fire in 1807. It was a bascule bridge

Bascule bridge

A bascule bridge is a moveable bridge with a counterweight that continuously balances the span, or "leaf," throughout the entire upward swing in providing clearance for boat traffic....

, which was opened for the boat traffic. It was replaced in 1904 by the new steel bridge.

History

The Small Bridge is the oldest bridge in Zrenjanin. It connects the town center with the Mala Amerika

Mala Amerika

Mala Amerika is one of the local communities in the city of Zrenjanin, Serbia. It is surrounded by the river Begej. The area used to be an island before the reconstruction projects were undertaken in the early 1980s, when that particular section of the river was cut up into three man-made...

 quarter. It was built in 1904, the same year as the Eiffel Bridge, often called "The Eiffel's bridge". There are some indications that the Small bridge was also designed in Eiffel

Gustave Eiffel

Alexandre Gustave Eiffel was a French structural engineer from the École Centrale Paris, an architect, an entrepreneur and a specialist of metallic structures...

's studio (it is similar to some bridges in Timişoara

Timisoara

Timișoara is the capital city of Timiș County, in western Romania. One of the largest Romanian cities, with an estimated population of 311,586 inhabitants , and considered the informal capital city of the historical region of Banat, Timișoara is the main social, economic and cultural center in the...

).

The bridge's first official name was "Franz Joseph I Bridge" ("Most Franje Josifa" in Serbian, "Franz-Josefs Brücke" in German, or "Ferencz József Hid" in Hungarian), named after Austro-Hungarian emperor Franz Joseph I

Franz Joseph I of Austria

Franz Joseph I or Francis Joseph I was Emperor of Austria, King of Bohemia, King of Croatia, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Galicia and Lodomeria and Grand Duke of Cracow from 1848 until his death in 1916.In the December of 1848, Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria abdicated the throne as part of...

. This bridge also had a movable middle part, to accommodate boat traffic on the Begej river.

After World War I, new authorities renamed it to "Караџићев мост" (Karadžić's Bridge), named after Vuk Karadžić. This name did not stick; among Zrenjanin citizens it simply remained "Мали мост" ("Small Bridge").

Small Bridge today

In the year 1985 the bed of the Begej river was moved and three lakes were made of its old bed; the bridge was left without the river. It now crosses one of the lakes, but it did not lose its significance. It is still one of the Zrenjanin symbols, of the century-old striving of its citizens to span the river, to enlarge and develop the town on its both banks.