page_title: Belgrade Fortress
section_title: Roman well (ca 1720s)
hierarchical_section_title: Belgrade Fortress / Features / Upper Town / Roman well (ca 1720s)
caption_attribution_description: This is a photo of Cultural Heritage site of Serbia number СК 3
context_page_description: Belgrade Fortress, consists of the old citadel and Kalemegdan Park on the confluence of the River Sava and Danube, in an urban area of modern Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It is located in Belgrade's municipality of Stari Grad. Belgrade Fortress was declared a Monument of Culture of Exceptional Importance in 1979, and is protected by the Republic of Serbia. It is the most visited tourist attraction in Belgrade, with Skadarlija being the second. Since the admission is free, it is estimated that the total number of visitors is over 2 million yearly.
context_section_description: The present facility, called the Roman Well, is neither Roman nor a (water) well. It is located along the southwest rampart of the Upper Town, in the vicinity of the Pobednik monument and the "King's Gate". An underground object existed during the mediaeval period and is referenced by Constantine of Kostenets during the rule of Despot Stefan Lazarević, in the first half of the 15th century. It apparently was a dungeon as it was mentioned during the 1456 Siege of Belgrade when 30 Hungarian conspirators died in it after their scheme to let the Turks into the fortress and surrender the city to them was thwarted. They were to be paid by the Turks, but were discovered and dropped into the pit with ropes. They were left there without food and after they began losing their minds from hunger, they were thrown knives to kill each other. Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi in 1660 wrote about the object as the grain silo.
  After the Austrians occupied the northern Serbia in 1717, it was obvious that there is a problem of providing water for the city within the fortress. Main sources were two large rivers, Danube and Sava, but as Belgrade was quite often under siege or a battleground, it wasn't practical as the rivers would become unreachable during the sieges so they searched for an alternative. Within the scopes of a massive construction and reconstruction of Belgrade in the Baroque manner, from 1717 to 1731 a present facility was dug and a complex wooden mechanism was installed to lift the water up from the pit of 50 m (160 ft). It was designed by Balthasar Neumann. Austrians originally intended to dig a proper water well. They descended to 54 m (177 ft), which is below the water level in the Sava, but found no water and actually hit the impervious rock layer. Then they decided to adapt it into the cistern and to conduct all surface water into it. The mechanism was manually operated, worked on the lever principle and had 12 segments, or pistons, which all worked at the same time when operated. Water was then "climbing", being poured from one vessel into another. Being made of wood, it got rotten and completely disappeared in time, but sometimes it is mentioned as the beginning of the "industrial period" in Belgrade.  The copy of the schematics is still being kept in the library of the Matica Srpska in Novi Sad. Neumann also constructed a double spiral staircase which descends 35 m (115 ft) down the shaft and based it on the staircase in the Saint Peter Well in Orvieto, Italy. The diameter of the shaft is 3.4 m (11 ft). The staircase has 212 steps and there is a small corridor at the bottom which connects two sections of the staircase, but it is usually flooded. On Austrian maps, it is named the Great Well, but when Serbian rebels liberated Belgrade from the Ottomans in the early 19th century they gradually named it the Roman Well as the common belief at the time was that all old buildings were Roman.
  
  In 1940 the Yugoslav Royal Army emptied the well, measured it and cleaned it. Because of that, during the World War II an urban myth spread through Belgrade claiming that the gold from the National bank of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was hidden in the well. German occupation forces sent three divers to check the bottom of the well, but all three disappeared. Some of the Yugoslav soldiers apparently carved a number "1940" near the bottom of the well.
  In 1954 a man threw his mistress into the well. Police wanted to prove that he killed her so the divers were dispatched to find the body, but they failed. Still, her body resurfaced ten days later. This story served as an inspiration for Dušan Makavejev when he wrote and directed the movie Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator in 1967. In 1964 Alfred Hitchcock visited the well and praised the "ambience". In 1967–1968, new exploration of the object was conducted. The divers discovered that the bottom is full of sludge and retrieved a number of skeletons, several animal ones and two human. In 1987 the divers explored whether there is a connection between the well and the Sa
caption: Roman well
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