Montenegro: One Country, Two Seas and a Bay That Stopped Time
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Montenegro means Black Mountain in Venetian Italian, a reference to Mount Lovćen whose dark peak rises behind the old capital Cetinje. The country is tiny — 13,812 square kilometres — but contains within it a Mediterranean coastline on the Adriatic, mountain ranges exceeding 2,500 metres, the Tara River Canyon (the deepest canyon in Europe), Lake Skadar (the largest lake in the Balkans), and the Bay of Kotor, a drowned river canyon so deeply inland that when sailing through it, it is impossible to see the open sea.
Kotor, the medieval walled city at the head of the bay, is a UNESCO World Heritage site whose Venetian-era walls climb the mountain behind the town in a series of fortifications that take over an hour to climb. The town inside the walls is small enough to walk across in ten minutes, its stone lanes and squares so intact that arriving there feels like stepping into a medieval Italian city that was preserved in amber. Venetian lions are carved into doorways and gates throughout. The cats of Kotor — hundreds of them, free-roaming and extremely well fed — are an unofficial tourist attraction and the subject of dedicated city guides.
Montenegro was the last country to join NATO that Russia had explicitly warned against joining, in 2017. The country has been independent only since 2006, when it separated from Serbia in a referendum won by the narrowest possible margin. The sense of a young country still establishing its identity — culturally, politically, regionally — is palpable.
