Facing Knin

The first thing you meet up here is not the monument. It is a grid of low concrete beams laid flat across the top of the ridge in open square cells, with a fern standing in every single one of them. It reads like the foundation of something that never arrived, or something that has since been taken away. Here and there a beam is broken off short and the rebar comes out of the stump in a rusted bundle. There is nowhere sensible to put your feet, so you walk along the beams.

From the edge of it the ground drops away and the town is spread out below — red roofs, a few blocks, a wide green valley with hills standing along the back of it. Whoever set this terrace out meant you to stand here and look down at that. It still works, but only just: the trees on the slope have got tall enough that you have to pick your spot.

Then you turn round.

The monument sits on a low mass of concrete and throws a fan of enormous slabs up and out of it, all raking the same way, like something caught halfway through a movement and then set. They are exposed aggregate, poured in lifts, so there is a seam every metre or so up the face of each one, and the corners are sharp enough that from underneath they read as blades. I counted them from one side and got a different answer from the other, because from most angles they overlap.

The light only picks out the edges. Everything else stays flat, and grey, and heavy.

I was up there late in the afternoon with the sun low enough to be coming in sideways, which laid a line of hot gold along every top edge and left every face in cold shadow. Underneath, it is hollow in places — a square hole drops out of the platform into the dark, and the cantilevers overhead are low enough to walk under without ducking. Ferns and young sumac have got up inside the structure and are coming out of the joints.

The lower slabs are tagged all over, mostly names and initials in black and blue. One of the marks is not a tag: a U with a cross drawn through it. I don’t know who put it there, or when. But it isn’t a signature, and it says the hill is still being argued about by somebody.

I went back down the way I came up. A hundred metres off, once the sumac has closed behind you, there is nothing to see at all — the trees have got over the top of it and the whole thing simply goes. It is the largest object for a kilometre in any direction, and you could drive past the bottom of this hill and never know it was there.