The Eastern City Gate

Belgrade has two gates and only one of them is famous. Everybody knows the western one — twin towers, sky-bridge, the dead restaurant on top, the poster shot of socialist concrete. I went to the eastern one first, three days earlier, mostly because nobody could tell me much about it.

If you’re in Belgrade, go. That’s my whole recommendation. It gives you the vibe of the old Soviet blocks I grew up seeing photographs of, except somebody took that idea and bent it into a genuinely interesting shape. Three towers on a hill, twenty-eight floors each, set at angles so they never quite line up. Walk a hundred metres and the composition rearranges itself — two towers, then three, then one wide slab, then a knife edge. I circled the base for half an hour and never got the same photograph twice.

And you can just walk in. No fence, no code, no ceremony. I took the stairs, which is free cardio and a good way to lose an afternoon, and the building gets more interesting the higher you go. What I hadn’t expected: some of the flats open onto terraces, several levels up, cut back into the mass of the block. People are out on them. That’s a real thing to design into a tower and nobody ever mentions it.

The famous gate is a symbol with a view. This one is where people hang their washing — and I got more out of it.

Unlike its famous twin, this gate is entirely, ordinarily alive. Every balcony is doing something: laundry, a bicycle, a satellite dish, plants, a folded parasol, somebody’s winter tyres. Graffiti at the bottom, a corner shop, cars parked nose-in on the grass. Nobody living there thinks they’re in a monument. They’re in a block on a hill with a long lift ride.

Nobody’s monument

From the roof, Belgrade goes flat and enormous — red roofs breaking into white slabs, dissolving into July haze — and you finally see why these three things are here. They stand at the top of the approach, so the city announces itself to anyone driving in from the east. A gate in the literal sense. You pass through it before you’ve arrived.

The concrete is rough, streaked, patched in a dozen greys where balconies have been closed in over the years. It isn’t being preserved. It’s being used, which is a harder and more honest kind of survival.

The buildings we agree to call important are almost always the empty ones. We photograph the dead restaurant and not the working lift; emptiness reads as meaning, and occupancy just reads as Tuesday. But this is what all of it was actually for — somewhere high and dry to put a lot of people, with a view most cities would sell tickets for.

Three towers still doing the job fifty years on, and nobody comes to look.