"Otrant 100" is the name of the exhibition of documentary photographs that was opened the night before yesterday at the Maritime Museum in Kotor, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Otranto Gate - the largest naval battle during the First World War in the Adriatic. The battle between the Austro-Hungarian Navy on the one hand, and the combined warships of Italy, France and Great Britain on the other, took place on May 14 and 15, 1917, in the area of the southern Adriatic and the waters of the Strait of Otranto, in which the Austro- many of our people from today's Montenegrin coast also took part in the Hungarian ships. Although outnumbered, the Austro-Hungarians, led by the battleship captain Miklós Horti (later the famous Hungarian head of state) on the cruiser "Novara", won a victory over the Entente forces, because without any significant losses of their own, they destroyed 14 small drifter patrol boats that uu the strait was maintained by the so-called The Barrage of Otranto - a barricade that prevented the entry of Austro-Hungarian and German submarines from the Adriatic into the Mediterranean and vice versa, and they sank and damaged several more Italian, French and British war and merchant ships.
The exhibition, in which about thirty warships of both conflicting sides were displayed, and some other interesting information about the battle, was jointly organized by the Maritime Museum of Montenegro from Kotor and the "Adriatic Sea" Society from Budapest. By the way, this association cultivates significant Hungarian maritime traditions from the time of Austria-Hungary, so it organized the same exhibition dedicated to the Battle of Otranto in parallel the night before last in Kotor and in Budapest. Srećko Čulić, a member of the branch of the "Adriatic Sea" Society from Split, spoke about the details of this important historical event from 100 years ago, pointing out that the Battle of Otranto was the first in the history of warfare at sea where the coordinated and simultaneous use of surface warships with submarines and by naval aviation. Ilija Mlinarević, curator of the Kotor Maritime Museum, pointed out the extremely important role of Boka Kotorska as the main Austro-Hungarian operational naval base during the First World War, from which many actions of its warships were launched.
"It is up to us who deal with maritime history to remember naval skirmishes, to analyze them and also to point out and appeal to the absurdity of warfare and send messages of peace, in these troubled times," Mlinarević pointed out.
Bonus video:
