Page 24 - PowerPoint Presentation

Avala Tower

The Avala TV tower is a telecommunication and observation tower located at mount
Avala in the southern suburbs of Belgrade. With a height of 205 meters it is currently the
tallest tower in Belgrade, Serbia and the Balkans. On a sunny day the views stretch up to
100 kilometers offering breathtaking panoramas of the city, the surrounding hills, towns,
roads and rivers, as well as to the Pannonian plain in the north.
The Avala Tower was a symbol of pride and a famous landmark, not only of Belgrade and

Serbia, but of the former Yugoslavia too.
The tower was designed by architects UglješaBogdanović and Slobodan Janjić, and
engineer Milan Krstić. Construction started on 14 October 1961 and was completed four
years later in 1965. The tower weighed 4,000 tons. It was the only tower in the world to
have an equilateral triangle as its cross section, and one of very few towers not perched
directly into the ground, but standing on its legs. The legs formed a tripod, the symbol of
Serbian tripod chair. It is one of the small number of towers to be constructed in that
manner.
The Avala Tower was destroyed on 29 April 1999 in the NATO bombings. The tower was
one of the last buildings to be destroyed before the end of the NATO operation. A special
bomb was used to destroy the tower. The blast was one of the loudest explosions heard

throughout Belgrade during the bombings.
In 2004, Serbian Radio Television commenced a series of fund-raising events in order to
collect money to construct the building once again at the same place where it stood
before destruction.