Dry Bridge is a bridge in Zrenjanin

Zrenjanin

Zrenjanin is a city and municipality located in the eastern part of Serbian province of Vojvodina. It is the administrative centre of the Central Banat District of Serbia...

, Serbia

Serbia

Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...

. It is a unique bridge because it currently does not span any physical obstacle, since the flow of the river under it was diverted.

History

The bridge was built in 1962 by the project of engineer Rada Janjatov, as a suspension bridge

Suspension bridge

A suspension bridge is a type of bridge in which the deck is hung below suspension cables on vertical suspenders. Outside Tibet and Bhutan, where the first examples of this type of bridge were built in the 15th century, this type of bridge dates from the early 19th century...

. Its purpose was to connect Zrenjanin city center with Mala Amerika

Mala Amerika

Mala Amerika is one of the local communities in the city of Zrenjanin, Serbia. It is surrounded by the river Begej. The area used to be an island before the reconstruction projects were undertaken in the early 1980s, when that particular section of the river was cut up into three man-made...

 quarter. Two holding towers, one on the north side and the other on the south side, are made of steel

Steel

Steel is an alloy that consists mostly of iron and has a carbon content between 0.2% and 2.1% by weight, depending on the grade. Carbon is the most common alloying material for iron, but various other alloying elements are used, such as manganese, chromium, vanadium, and tungsten...

 and concrete

Concrete

Concrete is a composite construction material, composed of cement and other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, aggregate , water and chemical admixtures.The word concrete comes from the Latin word...

. The northern tower is an 23-meter-high pylon, while the southern tower is A-shaped and 16 meters high. The suspension cable is made of 102 steel wires.

Without the river

In 1985, city authorities decided to fill in the secondary bed of the Begej river. A dike between two lakes of the former Begej bed was built at the bridge site, and 23 years after being built, Dry Bridge lost its purpose.

Today

, 23 years since the filling of the river, the bridge still stands, although rusty and in bad condition. City authorities plan to demolish Dry Bridge since it does not have any purpose and for safety reasons. Some residents claim that Dry Bridge has become an ironic symbol of Zrenjanin

Zrenjanin

Zrenjanin is a city and municipality located in the eastern part of Serbian province of Vojvodina. It is the administrative centre of the Central Banat District of Serbia...

, and should not be demolished, on the basis that it is the only bridge in the world that does not span any kind of physical obstacle; this is untrue, however, as Trinity Bridge

Trinity Bridge (Crowland)

Trinity Bridge is the unique triangular bridge that stands at the heart of the English town of Crowland, Lincolnshire.This bridge has three stairways that converge at the top. Originally it spanned the River Welland and a tributary that flowed through the town, although now the rivers have been...

is another example.