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“A city of incredible size was collapsing, I had never seen a bigger one in my life. The people swimming around me suddenly moaned and disappeared under the water. I bumped into the hat of one of those unlucky ones, hit him on the head and kept swimming up to the Nebojsa tower. I swam, I helped the soldiers to remove the survivors “, with these words, the retired professor of geography from Zemun Mihailo Miša Grkinić, described the tragedy of the” Danube Titanic “, that is, the ship” NIš “, which ended badly time, September 9, 1952., in the depths of the Danube between the Island of the Great War and the Nebojsa Tower, the number of victims has never been accurately determined and exceeds one hundred lives.
On September 9, 1952, a geography student from Zemun, Mihailo Miša Grkinić, promised his mother that he would come for lunch. At the last minute, he boarded the ship “Niš” in the port of Belgrade and met Emilia Katic, a junior high school student. He told her about the meteorology test and jokingly told her there would be a storm. At that time, the ship was caught in an unprecedented storm in which more than 100 people drowned. The watch Miša Grkinić wore that day was never repaired
Fatal decision of the ship’s captain.
Today, the retired professor of geography from the Zemun Gymnasium is one of the few living witnesses to the biggest accident in the history of Serbian shipping. As a good swimmer, Miša somehow swam to the Nebojsa tower, and Professor Katic was saved by the pioneering instructor Vasa, when he knocked her down on the make-up exam the previous year.
Due to the bridge repair, interest in the regular Belgrade-Zemun ferry line was significantly higher than usual. On that fateful day in September, 106 tickets were officially sold, but it is believed that there were about 150 people on board at the time of the accident (the exact number was never determined). Seeing that a storm was brewing, Captain Ferdinand Nobilo asked the duty officer and received approval to depart for Zemun earlier.
– I decided to leave earlier because the passengers were constantly coming to the ship, so as not to overload it – said Nobilo after the accident (Politika, September 10, 1952).
According to the police statement, “Niš” left Belgrade at 13 hours and seven minutes, sailed normally to the mouth, and was then caught by heavy rain, hail and wind blowing at a speed of more than 100 kilometers by hour. The captain ordered the helmsman to turn the bow into the wind and bring the ship closer to shore, but all maneuvering was in vain. Due to the force of the wind at 13 hours and 12 minutes, the ship capsized and sank to the bottom of the river at a depth of 14 meters. Seeking shelter from the rain, most of the passengers were trapped in the bowels of the ship at that time, in the ship’s lounge.
A lifeguard hat
In relation to the official time of the accident, Mišo Grkinić’s watch stopped a little earlier, at 1:30 p.m. When he managed to jump, he began to swim towards the Nebojsa tower, but due to the thick fog, the shore did not recognized at all.
– A city of incredible size was collapsing, I had never seen a bigger one in my life. The people swimming around me suddenly moaned and disappeared under the water. I came across the hat of one of those unlucky ones, put it on his head, and continued swimming to the Nebojsa tower. When I swam, I helped the soldiers to remove the survivors. Miša Grkinić recalls that after the shipwreck, he returned home to Zemun only around 5:30 in the afternoon, again by boat. Only then, when visited by study colleagues, did he realize what had actually happened and experienced a shock, he said, writing Blic in 2010.
A city the size of a chicken egg fell on the castaways who were not dragged into the abyss by the ship. The icicles literally broke people’s heads. Unconscious, they disappeared in the waves of the river. And then the fury of nature abruptly subsided, just as it had come. Those with boats nearby rushed to help the survivors.
In the act, the top of the highest state
A team of doctors from the Academy of Military Medicine arrived at the scene of the accident around 3:00 p.m., as well as the Police Ministers of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Aleksandar Ranković and Slobodan Penezić Krcun. A special commission was formed with the task of investigating the entire case, and due to the contradictory statements of the surviving crew and passengers, Captain Nobilo was temporarily detained. Zemun’s chronicler, Branko Najhold, noted that the ship “Niš” had a capacity of up to 60 passengers, but that in those days, due to the repair of the bridge, it was carrying more passengers than allowed. However, the investigation concluded that “force majeure” was to blame for the accident: a hurricane-force wind that uprooted trees.
During the afternoon, the “Soča” crane ship began to recover the sunken ship. First, the diver Bogoljub Perić descended into the depths. It reported that there were 56 people drowned in one of the two lounges below deck. In the morning hours of September 10, all the victims had been removed from the funeral boat. According to the first police report, there were 90 dead, including three of the six crew members. In the following days, the bodies of the drowned were found near the Pancevo bridge, on the coast of Vinča, Ritopek … The black balance increased to 127, but it was never determined how many passengers were in “Niš”. It is known that 106 tickets were sold, but also that there were many children and students, as well as passengers with monthly tickets, writes “Politika”.
Three days of pain and cover-up
The FPRY government declared three days of mourning and promised to help children who lost their parents and families who were left without a support. “Politika” and “Borba”, then the only newspapers in the capital, reported the tragedy with due care and carried the testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors. But, there was no place on the front page for the news about the sinking of “Nis”. The reason – which marks, what irony, the 10th anniversary of the formation of the Navy, so it was “not appropriate” to search for information about the shipwreck in Belgrade along with the festive text. The summer socialism of the young state did not welcome writing about failures and accidents, so the texts about the sinking of the ship “Niš” were kept to a minimum. The tragedy has been in collective oblivion and to this day it has not received a monument or a significant place in literature, with the exception of the novel “Shipwreck” by Vlado Arsić, writes “Politika”.
However, the “dictatorship of optimism” was survived and survived by urban records and legends about the victims and passengers miraculously rescued from the ship of death. About Dragoljub Jovanović from Zemun: that morning he became a father, so he went to Belgrade to buy gifts and on his way back he was killed on the “Danube Titanic”. About Marija Dimitrijević: he drowned together with his two minor daughters, and the third survived because his mother left him with a friend in the port of Sava, because there were too many people in “Niš”. About Ljubiša Petrović from Belgrade: Although he was not a swimmer, he remained on the surface, holding onto the board, until rescuers pulled him out. About the mother who left the maternity hospital that day: they found her in the bowels of the ship, with the baby in her arms. About Ana Bajzert, workers of the textile factory “Sutjeska”: he did not know how to swim and the waves miraculously brought him to shore alive. About an Air Force major who reached land, rowing with one hand, while holding the boy he saved with the other. His son and his wife remained on the sunken ship …
Meteorological record
The Belgrade storm on September 9, 1952, entered the annals of meteorology. The pluviogram (diagram of the intensity of precipitation) at the time of the sinking of the ship “Niš” showed up to 80 millimeters of precipitation in 20 minutes, or 4 millimeters per minute. Such intensity of precipitation is rare and lasts from one to two minutes, especially if it is the average value of 20 minutes.
Different versions
There are different versions about the fate of the “Danube Titanic”, as some called the ship “Nis”. According to some, painted black, with floats on the sides and under another name, “Niš” still sails from the “Strand” of Novi Sad to Sremska Kamenica. According to the second version, after the repair, “Niš” was given a new name “Senta” and until 1956 it operated on the regular line Smederevo-Kovin, and ended in the early seventies of the last century when it was cut in the “Brodoremont” from Pancevo.
What would have happened to the ship “Niš” if Captain Nobilo had not decided to leave before the scheduled time, if the competent service had not allowed him to do so, if there had been no panic among the passengers … We will never know the answer to these questions.
But there is an issue the state commission did not comment on. Shortly before the accident, the steam engine of the ship “Niš” was replaced by a much lighter diesel engine. This significantly reduced the load on the bottom of the ship, which had more passengers than expected, so the wind could easily knock it over. The significance of this story is confirmed by the fact that on the ship “Kovin”, launched in 1922, during the replacement of the steam boiler with a lighter diesel engine, a stabilizer was installed to make the ship more stable. and sure.
The fate of the captain
Ferdinand Nobilo, the captain of the ship “Niš”, did not sink with his ship. He was detained for a short period, but no legal proceedings were initiated against him. The state commission that investigated the case concluded that the sudden force of a hurricane was the cause of the tragedy and that no one was responsible.
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