Kosmaj

If you take one thing off this whole route, take this one. Kosmaj is a must.

I got there early, before the heat, and the forest was still holding on to the night. There’s a long flight of stone steps up through the beeches, weeds coming through every joint, and for most of that climb you can’t see the thing at all. Then a gap in the leaves gives you one blade of concrete at an angle no tree makes, and you know you’re nearly there.

At the top the trees stop and five enormous wings come out of the ground.

That’s the only honest way to describe it. Five concrete blades, thirty metres of them, splayed from a single point like something that detonated in slow motion and got frozen on the perfect frame. Photographs make it look like sculpture. Standing under it, it feels like weather. Big, raw, and hidden in a forest — which is a combination I don’t think I’ve found anywhere else.

Almost nobody was there. Just me, the trees and thirty metres of concrete, and about an hour of complete quiet.

I had it to myself, and that turned out to be the whole experience. It gave me the feeling of a place out of a videogame — that specific thing where you come over a ridge and find a structure that shouldn’t be there, and you’re the first one to it. I don’t get that often any more. I got it here, at nine in the morning, for free.

You can walk in underneath, into the middle of the five, and that’s where it stops being a shape and starts being a building. From directly below the blades close over you and leave five wedges of sky. The concrete still carries the grain of the timber it was cast against — you can read the planks, fifty years on, like fingerprints. Whoever poured this cared how it would look from the one place almost nobody stands.

Left up here on purpose

No ticket, no fence, no interpretation panel, nobody. Grass coming up through the paving, shrubs edging in, the steps losing their edges. It isn’t ruined and it isn’t cared for either — it’s just up here, doing its job in an empty clearing, the way it has every morning since it was finished.

Give the hill the rest of the morning while you’re on it. There are old Serbian churches scattered around the area, small and very old and completely unlike the concrete, and going straight from one to the other does something to your head that I recommend.

I walked back down into the beeches and it vanished in about four seconds. From the road below you’d never know it was up there — thirty metres of concrete, and not a hint of it behind ordinary trees.