Every tower at Đavolja Varoš is wearing a hat, and none of them stands once it comes off. About two hundred columns rise out of one ravine on Mount Radan, in southern Serbia, two to fifteen metres tall and some no thicker than half a metre. Under each slab of hard stone, what you are looking at is soft volcanic ash and grit with pebbles packed into it. Rain takes away whatever the caps do not shelter, so the sheltered columns are what is left standing. When a cap slips, the tower under it washes out within a few seasons. Somewhere else a buried block works free and a new column starts.
A boardwalk drops off the rim and threads between them, close enough for you to read the grain in their sides. From the viewpoint above, the field comes together: dozens of capped figures packed into the gully, all leaning downslope the same way, and that is the only place you see how many there are. Nothing softens it: the rock is bare white and ochre with rust-red where iron bleeds, and the oak and beech stop at the lip as if cut. The name is the Devil's Town, and it comes from the water rather than the stone. Below the columns Đavolja Voda seeps out as acid, at a pH of 1.5, and the ground around it stays bare. Groundwater works through pyrite veins in the old volcanic rock, sulphuric acid forms, and metals go into solution; Crveno Vrelo, a few steps away, runs rust red over its own bed. In the story the devil poured that spring out so the villagers would forget who was related to whom, and the wedding that followed, a brother marrying a sister, was turned to stone where it walked. Under all this run tunnels cut by Saxon miners brought here in the thirteenth century, one traced for 800 metres. Down on the boardwalk you pass stumps that have already lost their stone, standing beside towers that still carry theirs: the same column, a few years apart.