Built on the rock that narrows the Danube at Novi Sad, Petrovaradin was conceived by Habsburg engineers as an answer to Ottoman power on the river, and its nickname - the Gibraltar of the Danube - was earned by sheer mass. The film reads the fortress as a machine: angled bastions and ravelins laid out according to the science of baroque fortification, layered terraces stepping down to the water, and beneath them a network of counter-mine galleries running for kilometres through the rock. Above ground, the upper fortress has become a place of studios, cafés and viewpoints, dominated by the famous clock tower whose hands were reversed so that boatmen could read the hour from the river. Aerial photography establishes the geometry of the whole; night sequences catch the fortress lit above the water. Excellent for fortification series and Danube-themed strands.
