Immortalised in the Oscar-winning film Titanic, the RMS Carpathia is being celebrated with an open-air exhibition on the main street in Rijeka, the ship’s original destination before it answered a flurry of distress signals on the fateful night of April 14, 1912.
Lining the Korzo, a series of photographs and texts in English and Croatian tells the story of the steamship whose regular duties had been to transport Hungarian emigrés to the New World.
A quarter of its crew Croatians, the Carpathia then sailed some 65 miles off-course, negotiating an ice field as it rescued more than 700 survivors of the disaster, offering them warm food, drinks and blankets once they were hauled aboard.
Later knighted for his services, Captain Arthur Rostron then turned his ship around to return to the Titanic’s intended arrival point of New York, to a hero’s welcome. One of his crew, 18-year-old waiter Josip Car from Crikvenica, near Rijeka, who had helped in the rescue, had the presence of mind to keep one of the Titanic lifejackets as a souvenir.
Car duly brought it back home to Croatia, where he donated it to the Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral in Rijeka. It remains there today, one of five of its kind in the world, and the only one on permanent display in Europe.