The Matešić Mill

address: Podbadanj, near Orehovica
Period: Historicism
Kind: Immovable material heritage
Century: 19
Year: 1839
Purpose: industrial

The Matešić Mill operated in the immediate vicinity of the Matković Mill, below upper Orehovica, in Podbadanj, on the left bank of the Rječina river. It was probably built in the 1840s, because, according to archival sources, Antonio Mattessich wrote to the Glorious Council in 1839 and sought permission to build a mill on Rječina. The mill should have been located on Matešić’s estate at Comune di Cosala. Andrija Rački states in his work on the history of the town of Sušak (Povijest grada Sušaka) that the mill had fifty employees. In 1850, an aqueduct for supplying the mill with water was constructed. A very inventive method was used, one that does not require a dam, but instead uses a tunnel which extracts the water from beneath the rocks of the canyon (Le Rocce). It is evident that a lot of funds were invested in this mill, but unfortunately, on 1 February 1863, it burnt down to the ground and, after that, it was not rebuilt.Today, all that is left of the former mill are its ruins and its water tunnels.

In 1874, another mill was built north of the former Matešić Mill in the direction of Pašac, at a place called Koparovo. It had four millstones and a turbine of 35 horsepower and it was owned by Franjo Binovsky (1835-1898). Ten years later, in 1884, together with Rijeka’s meat entrepreneur Adalbert Ruhr, Binovsky opened a bone glue factory in the same facility. In 1890, they also founded a factory for the production of artificial fertilizers. In 1892, the Pest-based Spodium Factory (bone coal derived from bone carbonization) also joined the Ruhr & Binovsky Consortium. In 1907, the factory for the production of artificial fertilizers Ruhr & Binovsky perished in a fire and was not rebuilt after that. The factory employed up to thirty employees, which shows just how large the factory was for that time.

Apart from the aforementioned, the Rječina river had a number of mills, some private and some owned by the municipality and the religious orders. We should also mention the Bruni and Lenac mills which operated in the 1870s and were located in today’s Vodovodna Street.

Valorization:

Just like Matković Mill, Matešić Mill has been preserved to this day in a very bad condition. Although some cleaning works were done, the architecture has not been preserved and is subject to further ruin. Works on the construction of a promenade, leading from the Paper Mill along the Rječina to the mills on the Rječina, are underway. This route should facilitate the availability of these localities to public visits. Planned tunnels, designed for water supply line into the mill plant, which at the time were technologically quite demanding interventions, provide an added value to the mill.