A story of the shipwreck Euterpe
It may be so that our first tourists came long time ago with steamships from the north of the Adriatic. Our very first visitors were very often rich and young nobles who, when travelling, were also writing their memoirs. Today such memoirs are the first stories of travel adventures describing habits, costumes, architecture and many other facts of our Croatian coast and the coastal hinterland. From such stories we find out what was once eaten, how people were dressed, what kind of music they played, we discover many habits of the 18th and the early 19th century. Regarding our first visitors, there is a multi-disciplinary installation research project by Institute of Art History funded by the Croatian Science Foundation, Grand Tour Dalmatia.
One of steamships with such first travellers was Euterpe, built in 1886 in the J.L. Thompson & Sons shipyard. It was a large cargo-passenger steamship of the Austrian Lloyds Company.
Talking about Lloyds, just one digression. The Republic of Dubrovnik had the first maritime insurance law already in 1568, the Ordo Super Assecuratoribus, but already in 1395 in Dubrovnik there was signed one of very first maritime insurance contracts at all.
Euterpe traveled the Levant sea route until the outbreak of the First World War. At first it was hidden safe in the bay of Prokljan by Šibenik, but unfortunately in March 1918 it was leased to the Command of Maritime Transport in Rijeka. It did not serve long as the military transport ship as it was torpedoed by the Italian submarine F-7 about 1.5 nm from the island of Pag. In just a few minutes the ship disappeared from the surface. Of 1000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers and the crew only about 450 were rescued.
That was one of the greatest maritime tragedies during the First World War in the Adriatic.
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| The position of the wreck |
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| Flyer, info for the exhibition |
Primjedbe