Low water levels on Hungary’s second-largest river in Hungary, the Tisza, have revealed the body of the Szőke Tisza (Blonde Danube), the country’s largest-ever paddle steamer. Engineers are now drawing up plans to recover it without destroying the hull.
The Szőke Tisza was built in 1917 at the Budapest Ganz shipyard and was originally named after Charles IV of Austria, the last Emperor of Austria and the last King of Hungary, who ruled between 1916 and 1918.
As a prestige project for the country at the time, the ship was 77-meters long, had an 800-horsepower steam engine and featured all the luxuries of other contemporary ships. It first served on the Danube River, traveling the navigable length of the river from Passau on the German-Austrian border to the Danube Delta in Romania where the river finally flows into the Black Sea.
Over its almost 100 years of service, it had several different names. In 1919, when Hungary became a republic, it was renamed The Eagle. and then changed to St. Emeric in 1930 in memory of the crown prince who died 1,000 years previously. In 1950, it became the Liberation and in 1979 it was last finally named Szőke Tisza.
Eventually, the boat was parked at a dock and even serving as a disco before falling into a state of disrepair. It finally sank in 2012 in a river bay outside the town of Szeged.
Title image: The hull of the Szőke Tisza outside Szeged (MTI/Zsolt Czeglédi)
