The exhibition entitled "Ship Proletariat", authored by the historian Dražen Jovanović, was opened in the Collection of Maritime Heritage in Tivat.
The exhibition, which consists of a series of interesting technical drawings, photographs and old documentation, is a kind of tribute to the lifetime of a number of small ships: tugboats, barges, ferries, which during the past century wrote the history of the Adriatic and Boka Kotorska.
"These small, mostly unsightly and for most observers unattractive ships are a part without which no serious fleet, port or military base, such as Boka was from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 21st century, can function. floating cranes and other similar floating objects quietly and diligently performed their jobs for decades, transporting people and material, towing other larger ships, saving property and human lives at sea, building maritime infrastructure... Most often, they remained in the shadow of larger ones. and more attractive warships or large cruisers, but life at sea and on the shores of Boka simply could not be imagined without this kind of working class among the ships, the "ship proletariat" to whom we pay tribute in this way, symbolically in anticipation of May 1 - International Labor Day. , Jovanovic said.
To the audience, which included, among others, the commander of the Navy of the Army of Montenegro, the captain of the battleship Darko Vuković, and the honorary consul of Hungary in Montenegro Czsaba Magyar, Jovanović presented in detail the exhibited exhibits, among which there are vessels with a very interesting life history, and which are because of their reliable services during a series of decades in Boka, have become legends of this region.
Such was the case with the steam tender "Diligent", which for more than 60 years served in the Austro-Hungarian, Royal and then Socialist Yugoslav Navy, transporting the army and civilians between the coasts and the cities of Boka.
The exhibition also shows the plans of the large and modern tugboat "Močni", of the Royal Navy of Yugoslavia, which was built in Belgium in 1939 and never came to the Adriatic, because it suffered a fate similar to that of the legendary "Titanic", sinking on its first voyage somewhere in Biscay. gulf on the Atlantic.
The exhibition also includes blueprints of some of the vessels of the "Bokeljska plovidba" company from Kotor in the period between the two world wars, as well as technical documentation of never-built catamaran and trimaran ferries - rafts for the Kamenari-Lepetane ferry line, from the end of the XNUMXs.
The old way of life of a large naval base that existed in Tivat for decades is also told by the documentation of several very unusual vessels - rafts for bathing people in the sea, i.e. special rafts for washing clothes, which, using only the power of the sea and waves, and without detergents and the engagement of human power, very well washed even the dirtiest parts of the clothes of sailors and engineers from large warships, powered by coal and steam.
Gallery
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