Zemun
— — the river town the city grew around.
Not only on a wall.
“Once a separate town across the Sava from Belgrade, now a municipality of the capital with its own grain. The old quarter climbs from the Danube quay up Gardoš hill to the Millennium Tower, built by the Hungarians in 1896 to mark a thousand years of their kingdom. The streets near the water are narrow and Austro-Hungarian in feel, the cafés open out to the river, and the fishermen's stretch along Kej oslobođenja still sells perch and carp in the afternoon. From the tower at dusk the whole bend of the Danube goes the colour of a long coat left out in the rain.
Zemun, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Zemun is one of the seventeen municipalities of the City of Belgrade, on the right bank of the Danube at its confluence with the Sava. For most of its modern history it was a separate town across the Habsburg–Ottoman frontier from Belgrade itself, and only became part of the unified city in 1934. The old quarter retains an Austro-Hungarian street grid and architecture that visibly differs from the Ottoman and inter-war layers across the Sava. The municipality holds about 168,000 residents. The old core climbs from the Danube quay up Gardoš hill, capped by the Millennium Tower of 1896.
The Gardoš or Millennium Tower stands 36 metres high on the crown of Gardoš hill, built in 1896 by the Kingdom of Hungary as one of seven towers marking a thousand years of Hungarian settlement in the Carpathian Basin. Below it, the streets of the old quarter — Gospodska, Glavna, Sinđelićeva — keep the low Austro-Hungarian facades of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, plastered in ochre and cream. The Nikolajevska Church, the oldest Serbian Orthodox church in Belgrade still in use, dates to 1745. The Franciscan church on Glavna and the small synagogue building on Dubrovačka complete the layered confessional fabric of the old town.
Zemun is reached from central Belgrade in about twenty minutes by city bus 15, 84, or 706 from Zeleni venac, or in roughly an hour on foot along the Danube quay from Kalemegdan. The Gardoš Tower is open for paid entry most of the year and the climb to the lookout takes a few minutes. The fish restaurants along Kej oslobođenja are the traditional stop after the climb, especially for perch (smuđ) and carp. The Zemun Quay market sells fresh river fish in the early afternoon. Currency is the Serbian dinar; most cafés take cards.