However, the city government is not giving up on the gondola

On the same day, Tuesday, the deadline for comments and suggestions at the Public Presentation of the proposed urban project "Ušće", which includes the gondola on the Belgrade Fortress, ended, and it was announced that 420 million dinars are waiting for the gondola in the City's budget.

This means that the city government did not give up its intention to destroy the most valuable immovable cultural monument of Belgrade.

Vesna Marjanović, general secretary of Evropa Nostra Serbia, tells the "Vremena" portal that Evropa Nostra and the Institute of the European Investment Bank are still closely monitoring what is happening at the Belgrade Fortress. "If the gondola issue is re-actualized, Europa Nostra will again react strongly and send messages to all competent representatives of the EU Institutions and other relevant international organizations"

He emphasizes that "the professional public in Europe has already been informed about the huge threat that has loomed over our cultural heritage, and in the coming days a series of international and domestic meetings of experts and representatives of civil society will be held dedicated to endangered cultural monuments in Belgrade and Serbia, primarily the case of the General Staff and preservation the integrity of the Belgrade Fortress."

15 million euro contract

The construction of the gondola was first mentioned in 2016. At the end of the same year, the Ski Resorts of Serbia announced a tender for the preparation of technical documentation for the construction of the Ušće-Kalemegdan gondola, and in March 2017 the councilors of the Belgrade Assembly adopted a decision on the development of a Detailed Regulation Plan for the Kalemegdan-Ušće gondola and entrusted it to the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism of Serbia.

The detailed regulation plan was adopted in June 2018, and the contract worth 15 million euros was signed in October by the then Minister of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications Rasim Ljajić, the Mayor of Belgrade Zoran Radojičić and the director of the Public Enterprise of the Ski Resorts of Serbia Dejan Ćika.

The contract with the contractors was signed at the end of 2018, and in February 2019, the Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure issued a location permit, and Mayor Radojčić announced May as the start of work.

Photo: FoNet

In March 2019, 155 trees were cut down in the Ušće Park and on Kalemegdan on the area where the gondola was planned to be built, among which there were hundred-year-old trees.

It seemed like it would be okay.

Due to the violent reaction of the professional, ordinary, and foreign professional public because the City is destroying the Belgrade Fortress, the Administrative Court in Belgrade issued a decision in April 2019 ordering the halt of work on the cable car project with a gondola on Kalemegdan until the final decision on the legality of the construction permit which was issued for preparatory works by the Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure, headed by Goran Vesić at the time.

In September 2022, Aleksandar Šapić, then president of the Temporary Authority of the City of Belgrade, said that the court will decide whether the project threatens the cultural and historical heritage of Kalemegdan. He added that the project is legitimate and that "if it does not threaten the heritage, it will be implemented, if it threatens it, it will not." The project is not so expensive that it would have to be abandoned," said Šapić at the time.

And, because of that court decision and this statement by Šapić, it somehow seemed that the Belgrade Fortress was saved, that the personal interest of Ski Resort Šuma backed down in front of the facts that no one is allowed to touch it.

Photo: Tanjug/Dragan Kujundžić

And these are: the Belgrade Fortress has been a cultural monument of exceptional importance since 1979, since 2015 it has been on the preliminary list of UNESCO as a locality - part of a large "pan-European transnational" world heritage site called the Borders of the Roman Empire, and in 2019 it entered the register of the international organization Evropa Nostra with 14 endangered sites of European cultural heritage. The latter as a defense of the Belgrade fortress against the city government, which wanted to devastate it.

The government, however, is not giving up.

However, it recently turned out that the government is not giving up on the gondola.

Namely, on January 11, 2025, the public presentation of the urban project of the park "Ušće" was announced, which, in addition to the central city park, included the Museum of 21st Century Art, the Natural History Museum and the aquarium. The urban solution was defined on the basis of the first prize-winning architectural-urban solution of the team of architectural studio "MITarch" from Belgrade, headed by SANU academic Branislav Mitrović and Đorđe Alfirević.

Part of their solution is the "acquired obligation" from the Detailed Regulation Plan for the municipalities of Stari Grad and Novi Beograd from 2018 - the gondola.

The urban project of the Ušće Park, as the document is called, refers to the area from the confluence of the Sava and the Danube to the parking lot of the former Hotel Yugoslavia, on about 92 hectares.

There are plans to build a Museum of XXI Century Art, a Museum of Natural History and an Aquarium, a gondola, a lookout tower and a mast, and an advertising balloon for the Expo.

Now we will only talk about the acquired obligation, about the gondola (in addition to it, the mast was also acquired).

The gondola route stretches through the park near the Branko Bridge, while the gondola station is planned in the immediate vicinity of the intersection of Nikola Tesla Boulevard and Mihajlo Pupin Boulevard.

By the way, judging by the City's budget, neither the gondola nor the mast are planned for this year or next year: 420 million dinars for the gondola is only planned for 2027. So it's not for the Expo.