Bohemian writer Siegfried Kapper visited Belgrade in 1850 and in his 1853 book Südslavische Wanderungen (Roaming through the South Slavic lands) wrote: "I wandered off in the Turkish part of the city...and I reached some large, green meadow.

During the Čukur Fountain incident in 1862, as the fighting between Serbs and Ottomans happened in the vicinity, British and Russian consuls in Belgrade relocated to the tents in Kalemegdan, to have better insight in the situation.

When the Ottomans fully withdrew from Serbia in 1867, the Turkish pasha handed over the keys to the city to the ruling prince Mihajlo Obrenović.

The area of the town field was sort of a buffer zone between the fortress and the settlement outside of the Laudon trench, which separated the Turkish and the Serbian sections of Belgrade.

[3][4] The idea of turning the area into the park came from Belgrade's first trained urbanist, Emilijan Josimović, who in 1869 basically constructed modern Knez Mihailova Street.

King Milan ordered the levelling of the terrain in the eastern sections of the fortress and planting of the greenery and trees, which in time developed into the Kalemegdan Park.

Area at the top of the Little Kalemegdan, which is occupied by the Cvijeta Zuzorić Art Pavilion today, was an open fairground for a long time.

Tents were placed, with numerous attractions: panoptikum or collections of curios, okular ("funny" ocular lenses), magicians, fortune tellers, illusionists, etc.

In the 1920s and 1930s, new additions within the park were Cvijeta Zuzorić Art Pavilion, Monument of Gratitude to France, sculpture-fountain "Fisherman" by Simeon Roksandić, Belgrade Zoo, busts of poets and writers along the pedestrian pathways, etc.

It is additionally notable as the last Grand Prix to be held in Europe for many years as fighting in what would become World War II had started just days earlier to the north in Poland.

A pedestrian walkway along the southwest section of the fortress is called Sava Promenade (Serbian: Савска променада / Savska promenada).

An info table was placed later, saying that the works on the reconstruction began on 15 September, two days after the object was completely razed to the ground.

After public and media protests, the city owned communal company which administers the fortress, "Beogradska tvrđava", announced that the terrain is being prepared for the new object, which will have an artistic and cultural, but also a catering function.

[20][21] Since then, the leaseholders became known: two companies ("Cig" and "Black Rock"), which are already in the catering business, and which admitted that they planned to build a coffee shop, not to recreate an artistic of cultural pavilion.

City sued all three participants, "Beogradska tvrđava", "Cig" and "Black Rock" and on 27 November 2017 the court declared their lease contract void.

A fact that the investor didn't provide the proper archaeological survey, which he had to do since it is obligatory when it comes to Kalemegdan, was one of the reasons named for the banning the works by the Institute for the monuments protection.

[25] Already existing criticism of the project continued, from the officially used name (gondola instead of a traditional Serbian žičara) and chosen location, to the route, especially the Kalemegdan station which is a collapsible locality above the cave, in the area already prone to mass wasting.

With an enlarged price of €15 million and unified opposition to the project by the environmentalists, architects and urbanists, with additional cutting of over 100 trees in Ušće park across the river, this prompted popular protests.

[32][33] In its report, Europa Nostra described the project as controversial, irreversibly compromising for the fortress value, legally questionable, without clear purpose or any proper foundation of the idea.

[35] However, on 17 April 2019, Belgrade's Administrative Court temporarily halted further works citing legality of the construction permits but also saying that gondola lift may have "irreversible repercussions for both the cultural monument and the physical environment" and "damage wider public interests".

The statement concludes with the academy stating that Vesić's reaction "entails us to most firmly oppose to handing over the faith of the historical and cultural monuments, and identities of our cities, to the people whose ambitions and power are in obvious disproportion to their education".

[43] In the 2020 budget, city allocated further €4 million, while Europa Nostra placed the fortress on the list of 14 endangered world heritage localities in Europe, specifically because of the gondola lift project.

[49][50] New mayor from the same party, Aleksandar Šapić, said in September 2022 that the works will continue if they are "not endangering the heritage of Kalemegdan", and that project is "not expensive anyway".

[51] Government's Anti-Corruption Council in its September 2022 report asked for the project to be dropped, describing it as "against public interest, and as such harmful for Belgrade from numerous aspects".

The council concluded that the gondola lift might permanently damage basic values of the fortress and endanger UNESCO nomination, labeling the entire project as a textbook on breaking laws, procedures, planning documents, and rejecting numerous experts' opinions.

[55][56] Šapić then retreated a bit, stating this is just a "political idea" which is not hastily made, that only now analyses and surveys will be done to check the viability, that nothing will be built instead of the zoo but the fortress will be conserved instead, and that there is no set time frame for the project.

It has a special mechanism which consists of a steel cable and a separate handle which allows for the manual bringing down of the gondolas, in case of power outage.

Detailed plan on Kalemegdan from 1965 provided that, despite the immense archaeological value that lies beneath the fortress ground, basically only what was discovered by that time can be explored, restored or protected.

[61] When Emilijan Josimović drafted the first official urban plan for Belgrade in 1867, he envisioned a tunnel below the modern park area.

[66] With the neighboring residential area, Kalemegdan formed one of the local communities (mesna zajednica, a sub-municipal administrative unit), which had a population of 3,650 in 1981,[67] 3,392 in 1991[68] and 2,676 in 2002.