Montenegro – Greg and Mandy's Travels

Today was our visit to the last of the Yugoslav states which has managed to become a country in their own right – Montenegro.

Montenegro is the most eastern of the states, and the most heavily tied to Serbia. It didn’t gain independence from Serbia until all the other states had been recognised by the international community, and Serbia could no longer use the unity of Yugoslavia as an excuse. It also meant that they have greatly aggravated their neighbour, Croatia, by falling into line with Serbia and attacking Croatia during the Civil War.

However, Montenegro is also the poorest of the new countries, and that has a number of ramifications, principally that they can’t become members of the E.U. However, that doesn’t stop them from using the Euro as their currency, which is a nice little anomaly. More normally it’s the E.U. countries like the U.K. and Croatia who are members of the E.U. but don’t want to use the Euro.

Being poor they are looking for alliances and investors, and since they are a principally orthodox country that uses the Cyrillic language, it’s not unexpected that Russia is pouring infrastructure rubles into the country at a great rate. One can only hope that it all works out well in the end, and that Russia doesn’t come to dominate the country. There is always a piper to pay.

Left Dubrovnik early to avoid the crush at the border, which is a notorious bottleneck, to find only one other car at the gate ahead of us. The days objective was the Bay of Kotor, and three sights around it’s shore. The Bay of Kotor is one of the most indented parts of the Adriatic Sea, often called the southern-most fjord in Europe, but it is actually a submerged river canyon.

In the same way that Dubrovnik sold a 10 mile buffer zone to the Ottomans to protect themselves from the Venetians on their northern border, they also did the same thing on their southern border, and so the Bay of Kotor and its amazing harbour passed into Ottoman hands, and is now part of Montenegro.

The first stop was Perast, where we took a dinghy out to a small island in the middle of the lake upon which is built Our Lady Of The Rocks – a Roman Catholic church built on an artificial island made of rocks thrown into the sea by returning sailors. Even today, every year on the sunset of July 22, an event takes place called fašinada, when local residents take to their boats and throw rocks into the sea, widening the surface of the island.

Then on to the old Mediterranean port of Kotor which is surrounded by fortifications built during the Venetian period. It is on UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list and reminds me a lot of the Great Wall of China, as the surrounding wall is built all along the tops of encircling hilltops, quite distant from the city buildings itself. Smaller than the Old Cities of Dubrovnik and Split, it was nevertheless charming to walk around, due no doubt to the relatively small number of tourists.

After a couple of hours wandering around Kotor, it was on to Budva for some lunch and a walk in yet another walled city. This time it has a heavy Roman Catholic influence as it was under the control of the Venetians for some 400 years.

On the way back we crossed the Bay of Kotor on a vehicle ferry at one of it’s narrowest points. A short trip, but nice to see the vista of the surrounding hills from the middle of the water. Was the second car in the border queue on the way back, and arrived in Dubrovnik around 5pm.