If you visit Slavonski Brod, you must walk from the main square to a five-minute easy walk to the distant Brod fortress. It's about baroque border fortress on the river Sava, which is also a monument of zero category and a landmark of Slavonski Brod. Fortress Brod, respectively Fortress, is the most important historical building in Brod-Posavina County. Its size, almost monumentality, makes it almost unreal, although it is located in the very center of Slavonski Brod.
Photo: Brod-Posavina County Tourist Board
The construction of the fortress of a regular star-shaped shape began in 1715 and lasted for the next sixty years. The fortress was built at the instigation of Prince Eugene of Savoy as part of the fortress system in northeastern Croatia. That’s why her size fascinates. The fortress was designed to accommodate 5.000 soldiers, although it was seldom more than two thousand.
Huge trenches, bastions, curtains, hornwork, cavalier and ancillary buildings covered an area of two square kilometers, making the fortress greatly surpassed the city of Brod which stretched east of the fort. The soldiers in the fort were completely autonomous, as the fort's warehouses had to provide a full supply in the event of a 45-day siege. The fortress was never attacked nor did soldiers from the fortress ever attack neighboring Bosnia and the Ottoman Empire. It served only as a means of deterrence.
Photo: Slavonski Brod Tourist Board
The very existence of the fortress during the 18th and 19th centuries significantly influenced everyday life in the neighboring civilian town. The streets of the city had to extend perpendicular to the fortress, single-storey houses were the only permitted form of houses, and houses built within a rifle or cannon line had to be built of wood. Thus, in the event of an attack, the city would collapse, and the artillery would have free space around the fort.
The people of Brod shared the heavy burden of building the fortress with other inhabitants of the Slavonian Military Border. Earthworks on the fortress, firing bricks, obtaining timber and firewood most often made up the so-called fortress work. It was a free job that all men living in the wider vicinity of the fortress were obliged to do. In order to build the fortress, the Krajina people had to cut down entire forests, not only in the immediate vicinity but also in more remote parts of the Krajina.
Photo: Filip Beusan, CNTB
Today it is this building in the function of cultural development. It houses the city administration, music school, classical grammar school, traditional crafts, a unique tamburitza museum and the Ružić Gallery, which is, by importance, the second gallery of modern art in Croatia.
Source and cover photo: Brod-Posavina County Tourist Board
