Avala

I didn’t plan this one. I was on the way back from Kosmaj, which is how that whole week worked — I made a radial out of Belgrade, picking a direction each morning, driving out, driving back, sleeping in the same bed. Avala was on the line home and I’d seen the shape somewhere. So I turned off.

The road climbs through beech forest, folding back on itself, and the tower gives you nothing the whole way up — no skyline moment, no reveal. Then the trees stop and it’s standing in a clearing on three legs, looking much more like something that landed than something that was built.

That’s the bit the photographs never carry. Most towers are a shaft: a concrete pipe with a view stuck on the end. This one is a tripod. Three splayed legs come out of the grass and hand the whole tower over to itself sixty metres up, at a triangular collar you can walk directly underneath and stare into. I spent a while flat on my back in the dry July grass with the camera up, watching the three lines converge.

It’s a tripod. Once that lands you can’t unsee it — a War of the Worlds machine that stopped on a Serbian hill and decided to stay.

Honestly, there isn’t a lot to do here. There’s a café. There’s an outdoor gym with people actually using it. Families, dogs, a coach party. You pay a small fee and go up inside the tube to the deck, and Belgrade opens out underneath you: red roofs, then the blocks, then the towers of New Belgrade standing in the July haze like a separate city that hasn’t quite arrived. Somewhere out in that grey is the other gate, the famous one, still half-empty.

Worth it if you’ve got the time

So it’s not a ruin and it isn’t a secret. I’d put it like this: come if you have a spare afternoon in Belgrade, or if you specifically want to stand under the tripod monster. Those are both good enough reasons. It just isn’t the stop you build a day around.

What stayed with me is the other half of the story. It came down in 1999 — one strike, and the mountain had a stump on it for the next decade. Then it went back up, and not because a state needed a transmitter: it was donations, appeals, small money from a lot of people, eleven years of it, to rebuild a piece of concrete nobody needs in order to live.

Everything else in this journal is a building that lost. This is the only one I’ve stood under that lost and then got up again, and I think I like it more for that than for the architecture.

Then you drive back down through the forest and it disappears behind you, exactly the way it appeared.