Ušće (Belgrade)

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Ušće (Serbian Cyrillic: Ушће) is an urban neighborhood of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It is located in Belgrade's municipality of Novi Beograd.Twin tower Usce 2 will be finished until 2009.

1 Location
2 Characteristics
3 Buildings
4 References

[edit] Location

Skyline of the Sava's bank of Ušće by night (with the Ušće Tower), seen from the Kalemegdan fortress

Ušće is located on the mouth of the Sava river into the Danube, thus the name (ušće is Serbian for (river) mouth). It occupies Novi Beograd's Blocks 10, 13, 14, 15 and 16 on the Sava's left and the Danube's right bank, covering a tip of land that overlooks the islands of Malo Ratno Ostrvo and Veliko Ratno Ostrvo to the north and the old core of Belgrade, the fortress of Kalemegdan to the west. Ušće borders the neighborhoods of Staro Sajmište and Savograd on the south. As a compact grassy and forested area it stretches along the bank of the Danube into the Block 10, to the Zemun municipality and the Jugoslavija hotel, and the ENJUB shopping mall.

[edit] Characteristics

Like all of Novi Beograd, Ušće is flat, and without buildings to hide that fact like in the rest of the municipality, that is quite obvious here. With only three buildings and several smaller edifices, Ušće is the least urbanized section of Novi Beograd but some residential blocks are administratively attached to the local community of the same name, which had the population of 6,623 in 2002. Ušće is a vast grassy and forested area (2,5 km x 1 km) along the river banks. As such, it is used by many Belgraders as a recreational area or as a place for organizing political gatherings or musical concerts. However, many areas are not cultivated, but left to grow wild. During the high levels of the Danube and the Sava, bank areas are always flooded.

[edit] Buildings

Ušće has only three buildings, but two of them are monumental. One is the Palace of the Federation (Serbian: Palata Federacije or Палата Федерације), a seat of the former federal governments of Yugoslavia and Serbia and Montenegro (also called the SIV building). Another monumental building is the Ušće Tower, with 134 m of height the tallest building in the Balkans (it was second tallest before the NATO attack on Serbia in 1999 when Avala TV Tower just outside Belgrade was bombed down). Third important building is the Museum of Contemporary Art, close to the bank of the Sava river.

Other facilities in the neighborhood are several restaurants along the river banks and the Park of Friendship (Serbian: Park prijateljstva or Парк пријатељства), where during the Communist rule of Yugoslavia by Josip Broz Tito, many world politicians and dignitaries used to plant a tree when they visited Belgrade. Park has been in very bad shape lately as a result of low (basically, non at all) maintenance.

Bank of the Sava has numerous barges (in Serbian called splav or сплав), which since the early 1990s became center of the famed Belgrade's night life.