Smederevo was built in a hurry and on a scale that still astonishes. With Serbian power squeezed between Ottoman and Hungarian ambition, Despot Đurađ Branković chose the flat ground where the Jezava meets the Danube and raised a fortified capital there - a vast triangle of curtain walls and towers enclosing a town, with the ruler's residence in its own defended corner. The film traces that plan from the air, where the geometry is unmistakable, then walks the ramparts, the throne-room windows of the small town and the gates. It also confronts the fortress's later history: an Ottoman garrison town, and in the twentieth century the site of a catastrophic wartime explosion whose damage is still legible in the masonry. Restoration work continues today. A commanding subject for fortification collections and medieval-history strands.
