Đavolja Varoš means Devil's Town, and the town is made of stone towers that the weather keeps destroying and rebuilding. Roughly 202 earth towers stand in a ravine on the southern slope of Radan mountain. They are 2 to 15 metres tall and some are no thicker than half a metre, and each one survives only because a block of andesite sits on its head like a hat. Beneath the cap the rock is soft volcanic ash; rain scours away any ground the stones do not shield and leaves the sheltered columns standing. Every cap eventually slips, the tower under it washes out, and elsewhere another buried block works clear and a new tower begins. Two springs seep out below the towers, and one of them, Đavolja Voda — Devil's Water — is acid rather than mineral water, sour enough that almost nothing roots near it. That spring gave the place its name. The legend says the devil poured the water out so that the villagers would forget who was related to whom. A wedding party then set out with a brother and sister as bride and groom, and God turned the whole procession to stone. Those petrified guests, the story goes, are the towers.
A wooden boardwalk drops off the rim and threads between the columns, close enough to read the ash and pebbles packed inside them. Nothing softens the ravine: it is bare rock, white and ochre and bled rust-red where iron runs through it, and the oak and beech forest stops dead at its edge. The ground is hollow underneath, cut through by shafts the Saxon miners of King Uroš I sank here in the 13th century. Serbia protected the site in 1959 and put it on its UNESCO tentative list in 2002. You cannot come in winter, though: the gate is shut from December through March, and the towers are left alone with the weather that is slowly unmaking them.