Avala Tower

Listen first. The wind moves through the oaks and beeches of Mount Avala, and the air is cooler here than in the city below. Pine needles and damp leaves soften the path under your feet. Then you look up. A slender grey shaft rises out of the forest, sharp as a pencil, and seems to lean a little as clouds pass behind it. This is Avala Tower, and it stands on one of the few true hills overlooking Belgrade.

Mount Avala rises just south of the Serbian capital, less than twenty kilometres from the old centre. It is not a great mountain. It is a wooded hill of a little over five hundred metres. But the land around Belgrade is mostly flat, with rivers and plains stretching north toward the Pannonian basin. So this modest summit works as a natural lookout. For generations, people from the city have come up here on weekends to walk, picnic, and breathe cleaner air.

The tower in front of you is a telecommunications tower. Its first job was practical: to carry television and radio signals across Serbia. Yet it was never designed to look purely functional. The original tower was built in the first half of the 1960s, when Yugoslavia was confident and modern design was a point of national pride. The architects Uglješa Bogunović and Slobodan Janjić shaped it as a piece of sculpture as much as a piece of engineering.

Look closely at the base, and you will notice the first surprise. The tower does not plant itself straight into the ground like a chimney. It stands on three angled legs, like a tripod, or like an upside-down letter Y. The shaft above has a triangular cross-section rather than a round one. From some angles it looks thin and almost fragile. From others it looks heavy and solid. Walk slowly around it, and the shape changes with every few steps.

That tripod design was unusual for its time. Most television towers of the era rose from a single wide foundation. Here, the weight rests on the three legs, which leaves open space beneath the shaft. The effect is light and elegant, as if the tower is stepping onto the hill rather than growing out of it. Many Belgraders came to see it as a symbol of the city, visible on clear days from streets and balconies far away.

The tower rises just over two hundred metres. For decades it has been one of the tallest structures in the Balkans. Up near the top, more than a hundred metres above the ground, there is an enclosed observation level. A lift carries visitors up the shaft in under a minute. On a clear day, the view stretches over forests, villages, and fields, with the grey spread of Belgrade to the north.

Now the story turns dark. In the spring of 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the tower became a target because of its role in broadcasting. On the 29th of April 1999, it was hit and brought down. The whole shaft collapsed into the forest. For many people in Belgrade, the loss felt personal. A familiar shape had simply disappeared from the skyline overnight.

For several years, only the stump and the memory remained. Then a reconstruction effort began in the mid-2000s. Part of the funding came from public donations, from ordinary citizens and from Serbians living abroad. The new tower was built to closely follow the original design. It opened in 2010. So what you see today is not the 1960s tower, but a faithful second version of it, standing in almost the same spot.

Here is the second surprise. Many visitors assume the tower is the oldest landmark on this hill. It is not. At the very summit, a short walk away, stands the Monument to the Unknown Hero. The Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović designed it in the 1930s, after the First World War. It honours soldiers whose names were never known. Its dark polished stone and its tall female figures, called caryatids, carved as columns, feel very different from the clean concrete of the tower.

That monument stands on the site of an old medieval fortress called Žrnov. The fortress was demolished to make room for the memorial, so almost nothing of it survives above ground. Still, it tells you something about this hill. People have used Avala as a lookout and a stronghold for centuries. The tower simply continues that long habit of watching over the land from here.

There is another, quieter memorial on the mountain. In 1964, a plane carrying a Soviet military delegation crashed on Avala. The officers were travelling to Belgrade for the anniversary of the city's liberation in the Second World War. A monument to those who died stands in the forest. It sees fewer visitors than the tower, but it adds one more layer to this small, layered hill.

Before you go up, or after you come down, take a moment at ground level. Notice the people around you. Families with children, couples taking photographs, older Belgraders who may remember both towers. Notice too how the forest frames the concrete. Trees grow close to the base, and in autumn the leaves turn gold and copper against the grey. The tower is a city landmark, but it lives inside a park.

So stand here for a last minute. Look up along the three legs, then follow the triangular shaft as it narrows toward the sky. Listen again to the wind in the trees. This tower fell once, and people chose to raise it again in the same shape. As you walk back down the path, turn around once more. Watch how it slowly disappears behind the branches.