Third street · Croisée

The hillGardoš — cobbles, a ruin, a tower for a thousand years, and the view across the water

The lanes up Gardoš are cobbled and narrow and most of them were never meant for anything with an engine, so you climb the way the town climbed: on foot, between one-storey houses with their shutters half-closed, past a tavern in the Ćukovac lanes that is first mentioned in a document of 1658, which makes it older than the quarantine, older than the Habsburgs here, older than nearly everything except the ground. Zemun has three hills over the river — Gardoš, Ćukovac, Kalvarija — and this is the one with the tower, so this is the one you climb.

At the top, under the tower, is the oldest thing in the town: a few courses of a fortress wall from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, rough stone and brick, waist-high. That is all that is left of the castle that held this crossing before the Turks, before the Austrians, before anyone thought to build a quarantine below. And on it, in 1896, the Hungarians put up a tower to mark a thousand years since their ancestors rode into the plain — one of seven such monuments at the corners of their kingdom, and this was the southern corner, the very edge, with the Ottoman fortress in sight across the water. The tower was opened on the twentieth of August. It is red brick and pale stone, with four small turrets at its feet like children, and for most of its life its practical use was as a lookout for the town's firefighters, who could see every roof from up here.

Beside the tower is the cemetery, and the cemetery is the thing I did not expect. It is one cemetery, not four: Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish dead lie in it together, on the same hill, under the same tower, which in the Balkans is nearly unheard of. A frontier town gets everyone, and a frontier town that ran a quarantine got everyone's sick, and it seems the town decided long ago that whoever died here was from here. I walked the rows a while. There is no view from the graves; the view is from the tower.

And the view is the reason for the town. From the top of the tower you see the roofs of Zemun below you, red and close, the baroque spire of the Bogorodica church, the trees; then the Danube, wide and grey, with the long wooded Great War Island lying in it; and on the far side, small under the sky, Belgrade — the fortress on its rock, the towers behind. For two hundred years this was the exact place from which one empire watched the other. Now it is where you go with someone on a Sunday to look at your own city from outside it. I know that look. It is the one I give the house from a window.