Timișoara Old Water Works: Iosefin's Industrial Relic
The old water works in Iosefin are not a museum. They are a fenced-off depot with a truncated chimney and two cracked pumps. But they tell the story of how Timișoara got clean water, and why cholera forced the city to build them.
The first municipal water works in Timișoara were not a civic boast. They were a response to cholera. In the 1860s the city drew drinking water from wells sunk into the same gravel that received its cesspits. The Bega was cleaner then than it would later become, but the wells were the problem. Between the 1831 and 1866 outbreaks, thousands died. The Habsburg administration in Vienna eventually paid attention. An engineer named Karl von Birago had already built a water system for Vienna; his pupil, Josef von Engerth, drew up plans for Timișoara. The works that resulted, on the left bank of the Bega in Iosefin, began supplying the city in 1869. They ran, with modifications, until the 1970s.
The site is not a museum. It is a working compound that has been partly decommissioned, partly adapted. The main pumping hall still stands, a long brick building with tall arched windows and a timber roof that has been repaired more than once. The chimney, which once carried smoke from the coal-fired boilers, was shortened after the boilers were removed. The filter beds, which occupied a large open area, have been filled in or built over. What remains is enough to reconstruct the system, but you have to look past the later additions: a concrete shed here, a chain-link fence there.
Why the Bega, and why here
The Bega was not chosen because it was pure. It was chosen because it was available and because the technology of the time could make it acceptable. The river rises in the Poiana Ruscă mountains and reaches Timișoara after passing through Făget and Lugoj. By the time it arrived in Iosefin it had already received the sewage of smaller towns. The engineers knew this. They did not pretend to produce mineral water. They proposed a two-stage process: settlement and slow sand filtration. The water was drawn from the river at a point upstream of the city's main drains, led into settling basins, then allowed to percolate through beds of sand and gravel. The filtered water was collected in a covered reservoir and pumped into the distribution network.
The intake was on the left bank, just downstream of the present-day Podul Mihai Viteazul but before the Bega's confluence with the Timișel. The exact spot is now buried under the embankment for the Bega canal. The settling basins were rectangular, brick-lined, and shallow. Nothing of them survives above ground except a depression in the yard that fills with water after heavy rain. The filter beds were arranged in two parallel rows of four. Each bed was about 20 metres by 30 metres. The sand layer was 80 centimetres deep over a bed of graded gravel. When the sand clogged, the top few centimetres were scraped off and replaced. The dirty sand was washed and reused. That practice continued until the works closed.
The pumping machinery
The heart of the works was the engine house. The original engines were horizontal single-cylinder steam engines, built in Vienna by the Maschinenfabrik of Sigl and Co. They drove double-acting pumps that lifted water from the filtered-water reservoir to a service reservoir on the Dealul Cetății, the hill behind the present-day cathedral. The head was about 30 metres. Each engine could deliver roughly 120 cubic metres per hour. Two engines ran, one stood by. Coal came from the mines at Anina and Secu, brought by rail to the Gara de Est and then by cart or narrow-gauge tram to the works. The boilers were Cornish type, later replaced by Lancashire boilers. The chimney, now truncated, was 35 metres high when built.
In 1907 the steam engines were replaced by electric motors. The electricity came from the city's own power station on the Bega, which had opened in 1896. The pumps themselves were kept, but the transmission changed from belts to direct coupling. The engine house was extended to accommodate the switchgear. A new pump house was built alongside, with centrifugal pumps instead of reciprocating ones. That building still stands, a plain brick structure with a corrugated roof. Inside, two of the original centrifugal pumps remain, their casings cracked, their impellers removed. The electric motors that drove them are gone, but the concrete plinths with their rusted anchor bolts are still there.
The filter beds were the most labour-intensive part of the system. Cleaning them was a job for unskilled men with shovels, and they did it in all weathers.
The 1907 conversion was not the end of change. In 1923 the works were connected to a new deep-well supply at Giroc, which drew from the Pannonian aquifer. That water was harder but bacteriologically safer. The Bega supply was gradually reduced. By 1940 the works were treating only a fraction of the city's demand. After the Second World War, the communist administration expanded the Giroc field and built a new treatment plant at Urseni. The Iosefin works were kept as a standby until 1975, when they were finally shut down. The filter beds were filled with rubble from the demolition of the old settling basins. The engine house became a store for pipes and valves. The chimney was shortened to improve the draught for a nearby boiler house that no longer exists.
What you can see today
The site is not open to the public. It belongs to the local water utility, Aquatim, and is used as a workshop and depot. You can see the buildings from the street, but to go inside you need permission. The main gate is on Splaiul Tudor Vladimirescu, near the corner with Strada Ion Ghica. The engine house is the tall building with the arched windows on the left as you face the gate. The chimney is behind it, now about 18 metres high. The pump house is to the right, a lower building with a flat roof. The filter beds were in the open area beyond the pump house, now a concrete yard with stacked pipes and a few parked vans. The service reservoir on Dealul Cetății was demolished in 1962 to make way for the construction of the Orthodox cathedral. Nothing remains of it.
Inside the engine house, the original overhead crane rail is still fixed to the walls. The crane itself is gone. The floor is concrete, poured in 1907, with drainage channels down the centre. The bases of the steam engines were cut down to floor level when the electric motors were installed. You can still see the bolt holes for the engine beds. At the far end, a small office has been partitioned off with plasterboard. It contains a desk, a filing cabinet, and a poster about hand-washing. The timber roof trusses are original, but the roof covering is corrugated metal, not the original slate. The windows are mostly intact, though some panes are cracked. The brickwork is sound but needs repointing in places. There is a damp patch on the north wall where a gutter has failed.
The most impressive surviving machinery is in the pump house. Two centrifugal pumps, made by the Budapest firm of Ganz and Co. in 1907, sit on their original concrete plinths. They are horizontal, single-stage, with cast-iron volutes. The suction and discharge flanges are still connected to rusted pipework. The impellers were removed when the pumps were decommissioned, but the shafts remain. The bearings are white-metal, fed by ring oilers. The oil reservoirs are dry. Next to the pumps is a small electrical panel with porcelain insulators and a brass ammeter. The ammeter needle is stuck at zero. On the wall above, a hand-written sign in Romanian says 'Nu atingeți' — do not touch.
The pipework that connected the works to the city is mostly gone, but one length of cast-iron main survives in the yard. It is about 30 centimetres in diameter, with lead-caulked joints. It was dug up during roadworks on Bulevardul 16 Decembrie 1989 in 2012 and brought back to the site. The pipe is stamped with the name of the manufacturer, 'Abraham Ganz, Buda', and the year 1868. It is one of the few tangible links between the works and the city it served. The rest of the distribution network has been replaced with modern plastic and ductile iron. The original valves, which were operated by hand wheels, were removed and scrapped in the 1980s.
The engineering behind the system
The works were designed on the principle of gravity plus pump. Water was drawn from the Bega by a canal that led to the settling basins. The canal was about 400 metres long, 3 metres wide, and 1.5 metres deep. It had a sluice gate at the intake to control the flow. The settling basins were two in number, each 50 metres by 20 metres, with a maximum depth of 2 metres. They were arranged in series, so that the water had a residence time of about 12 hours. The basins were cleaned manually every two to three months. The sludge was spread on land nearby and used as fertiliser. That practice ended when the works closed.
From the settling basins, the water flowed by gravity to the filter beds. The beds were controlled by a system of weirs and valves that allowed each bed to be isolated for cleaning. The filtered water was collected in an underdrain system of porous pipes laid in gravel. It then flowed to a covered reservoir with a capacity of 1,200 cubic metres. The reservoir was underground, built of brick with a vaulted roof. It was divided into two compartments so that one could be emptied for cleaning while the other remained in service. The reservoir was demolished in the 1960s, but its outline can still be seen as a slight depression in the yard.
The pumps lifted the water from the covered reservoir to the service reservoir on the hill. The service reservoir was also underground, with a capacity of 800 cubic metres. It was at an elevation of about 40 metres above the works, which gave a static head of 30 metres at the works and about 20 metres at the far end of the distribution network. That was enough to supply the city's buildings up to four storeys without additional pumping. For higher buildings, booster pumps were installed in the basements. The service reservoir was demolished in 1962, but its site is now a paved terrace in front of the cathedral. The elevation is still the same.
The distribution network was laid in the 1860s and 1870s. It consisted of cast-iron pipes in diameters from 10 to 40 centimetres. The pipes were laid in trenches about 1.5 metres deep, with a sand bedding and a clay seal. The joints were lead-caulked. The network was divided into districts with valves to allow isolation for repairs. The original valves were operated by hand wheels, some of which were set in cast-iron boxes flush with the pavement. A few of those boxes survive, but the valves inside have been replaced. The network was extended several times, notably in the 1890s when the Fabric and Elisabetin districts were connected. By 1910 the network covered about 60 kilometres. It now covers more than 600 kilometres.
The works were not without problems. The Bega was subject to flooding, and the intake had to be protected by an embankment. The water quality varied with the season; after heavy rain, the filter beds clogged more quickly, and the water was occasionally turbid. There were outbreaks of typhoid in the 1880s that were traced to the water supply, though the cause was later found to be a cracked pipe that allowed sewage to enter. The crack was repaired, and the incidence of typhoid declined. By the 1900s, chlorination was introduced as a supplementary treatment. The works never used ozone or UV, which were not available at the time.
The Iosefin works were not the only water works in Timișoara. There was a smaller works in Fabric, on the right bank of the Bega, which served the eastern part of the city. That works was built in 1880 and closed in 1920. Its buildings were demolished in the 1930s to make way for a textile factory. Nothing remains. The Iosefin works were the larger and the more important, and they are the only ones with substantial surviving structures. They are not listed as a historic monument, but they are included in the city's inventory of industrial heritage. Aquatim has no plans to demolish them, but it also has no plans to restore them. They are maintained in a functional but not a pristine condition.
To visit, you need to write to Aquatim at their headquarters on Strada Gheorghe Lazăr. They sometimes allow groups, but not individuals. The site is not signposted. If you stand on Splaiul Tudor Vladimirescu and look across the Bega, you can see the chimney and the roof of the engine house. That is the best most people will get. The water that comes out of the taps in Timișoara today comes from the Giroc and Urseni plants, not from Iosefin. The Bega is no longer used for drinking water. It is used for irrigation, for industry, and for the rowing course. The old works are a reminder of a time when the river was the city's lifeline, and when engineering was a matter of life and death.