Belgrade Trip – Belgrade Fortress (Zindan Gate)

Once again, I won’t be winning any awards for photography with the blurry photos, but it was raining for the entire time that I was at the Belgrade Fortress which has led to some (well, quite a lot) sub-optimal imagery. Belgrade Fortress has one of the most challenging histories to unpick given how many times it has been raided, besieged, stormed, attacked and so on, but this is the Zindan Gate or the ‘dungeon gate’.

The gate was originally built by the Hungarians between 1440 and 1456 and was the first part of the fortress to be constructed with cannons in mind. It worked for a while, but then the Ottomans took the fortress in 1521, but they didn’t do much more with the gate because the frontline had moved on from Belgrade and they didn’t need to defend it. The Austrians decided to get a bit aggressive for a while, indeed hundreds of years, and it bounced between their occupation and the Ottomans who would take it back.

The rear of the gate. Reminding me of the rather aspirational modernisation of Carcassonne Castle, the current design of the gate is modern and dates back to the 1938 restoration which gave it an appearance which it had never had. It’s possible to walk all around the gate and it has a more elevated position than might be evident from these photos.

Views from the top of the gate over the River Danube. There’s a wooden bridge now in front of the gate, this is recent, but there was once a drawbridge designed to keep the ruffians out. Today, it’s one of the main entrances into the Belgrade Fortress, a large complex which is free of charge to enter and there are plenty of interpretation boards to help explain the history of the site.