2023 Balkans - Day 3 Perast, Kotor and Kotor Bay, Montenegro

We drove this morning from Herceg Novi along the panoramic coast of the Bay of Kotor to the town of Kotor. Technically four bays, it has been designated as one of the most 25 beautiful bays in the world. 

Little towns huddle along the coast.

A crane from the Montenegro’s former shipyard looms as a reminder of past industry. After the Dayton Peace Accord ended the Bosnian War in 1995, the shipyard was closed. 

Clusters of buoys mark the location of mussel farms. They are attached to submerged cages, and harvested by boat as seen above.

Perast, with its one street, 16 Catholic churches and 17 Renaissance and Baroque palaces in various states of repair, is now a village of 400 residents. In its heyday, there were a few thousand. Venetian and Russian nobles sought to outdo each other with their magnificent summer homes. 

Just off the shore are two unusual islands. One, St. George’s Island, is a bonafide island housing a Benedictine monastery and a big cemetery. It’s picturesque, like everything else along the bay. But you cannot visit it.

A few hundred meters away is Our Lady of the Rocks, a church constructed on an artificial island. According to legend, two sailers passing this spot in 1452 found a painting of the Madonna and Child on a rock. One of the men was miraculously cured, and they felt a church should be built on the spot.  Generations of sailers left rocks at the spot in gratitude for their safe return to port. Boatloads of rocks were also ferried here and purposefully sunk until sufficient land was created to hold a church. 

A small, ornate chapel forms the core of the present building, with donated paintings and thousands of silver plates. The miraculous painting of 1452 is over the altar. 

The adjacent building is a museum of artifacts donated or gathered from the island. 

We continued on to the delightful town of Kotor. Dating back to Roman times, the town is encircled by a tall stone wall, which was started in the 9th century. Improbably, construction continued for the next thousand years. The loop enclosing the town proper was competed by the 14th century, and then it was extended up the adjacent mountain. It climbs over 800 vertical feet to St. John’s Fortress. 

You can pay 8 Euro for the privilege of climbing to the top (the hike is about 3/4 of a mile, with 1350 steps) for incredible views, but we didn’t have the time. Instead, we climbed to the top of the regular city wall to take a photo. 

Part of the fort can be seen in the ramparts running off the top right corner above. 

The city map shows the extended walls snaking up the mountain, with the city tumbled into the lower left corner. The big wall above is the cream colored straight line running up the lower left side.

Kotor’s Old Town, or Stari Grad, is full of restaurants, shops, churches, cats, ice cream, and charming, twisting little streets. So much atmosphere! No wonder it is one of Montenegro’s three UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The icing on the cake - Kotor is known as the City of Cats. There are hundreds of well-tended, friendly cats milling about. They are said to be descended from seafaring cats, and tended by residents who place food and water out for them. They sun on cobblestone streets and frequent the outdoor seafood restaurants, weaving between legs of diners while waiting for a scrap. For cat lovers, it’s fetching. For others, it’s probably annoying (but falling into the first category, I wouldn’t know)

After a walking tour of the Stari Grad and a couple of hours of free time to wander around, grab some lunch and a few geocaches, we headed back to Herceg Novi for our last evening in Montenegro. 

BONUS TRACK

Greg spotted this lad in the Maritime Museum of Montenegro, which is housed in an early 18th century palace. He was the young boy chosen as “Junior Admiral”  of the Boka Marines (Bay of Kotor Marines) in 1924. The Boka Marines were established in the early 9th century, and serve as an elite corp with special functions, dancing in special formations during annual events. It’s apparently quite a big deal to belong. Marshall Tito even visited the museum in 1969 and was proclaimed an honorary admiral of the Boka Marine. 

Perhaps he is a distant relative of Greg’s. See any resemblance? Donna, maybe you have an old photo of Greg in his band uniform?

2023 Balkans - Day 2 Herceg Novi Bay

We began our program today with a lecture by Sandra, a local expert on the history and present-day life in Montenegro.

Today is Victory Day in Montenegro, the day on which Russia and some former Soviet countries observe the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.

Montenegro has been settled or occupied by: Neolithic tribes, Illyrians, Romans, Slavs, Byzantines, Serbian medieval state, Ottomans, Venetians, French, Austro-Hungarians, Berlin Congress, Kingdom of Serbia Croatia Slovenia, Axis powers and Yugoslavia. 

Marshall Josip Tito was able to build and hold a united Yugoslavia for nearly 40 years. Was first communist leader to defy Soviet dictates, promoting a policy of non-alignment between the two blocs of the Cold War. Yugoslavia joined neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. But Yugoslavia needed a strongman like Tito to keep its various factions in equilibrium. Seven years after he died in 1980, civil war erupted between the Yugoslavian republics. 

When the dust settled, seven countries had been formed from the former Yugoslavia: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Albania and Northern Macedonia.

(Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Independence of the former Serbian province is recognized by most, but not all, countries. It is not a member of the UN. To dissent from some members of our group, Sandra compared its situation to that of the Crimea. She said that if allowed to vote, the majority of Kosovo citizens would elect to remain Serbian.)

SO -

Montenegro first achieved independence in 1878

Became part of Yugoslavia in 1918 after World War I

2006 - independence from Serbia

Joined NATO in 2017

Not in EU - yet. But application process is underway

Euro is currency

Flag includes double-headed eagle, symbol of a former government

Known as “Jewel of the Adriatic”

One of the world’s fastest growing tourism economies

Beautiful scenery. Towering mountains (8313 ft), cascading rivers, deepest canyon in Europe, crystal clear seas.

70% of country is mountainous

Was once covered by forests; still predominantly forest in the north

Has ancient history and culture

Montenegro means Black Mountain - name first used by Venetians in 13th century.

Small country, slightly smaller than Connecticut

- 520,000 population in 2011

- Ethinic groups: Montenegrin (45%), Serbs ((29%), Bosniacs, Muslim, Albanians, Croats, Roma

- Religious groups: Orthodox Christian (72%), Catholic, Islam (16%), Muslims, Atheist

- New census overdue. 2021 census delayed by COVID. Now delayed by government as factions try to agree on whether and how to record ethnic/religious groupings. (Ethnic identity, going back centuries and sometimes more a matter of family tradition, culture and self-identify than actual genetic makeup, has been the source of conflict and resentment for centuries. It’s partly self-fabricated, as there have been so much mixed-marriage and integration over millennia.)

Education

- Free from 6-18.

- Elementary school compulsory, high school optional but most continue

- English taught from first grade. Second language added in 6th grade

- Cyrillic and Latin alphabets are both acceptable. Taught Cyrillic first, then Latin alphabet added later.

In answer to questions from our group, Sandra said that Montenegrins have the same big-picture concerns about the future as we do (her examples): climate change, artificial intelligence, space travel, young people using phones for social media and not the power of knowledge they are carrying around. But as she pointed out, they are a tiny country with a tiny influence. She hopes that large countries with large resources and influences can do the right things.

Our brains were full. And this is only the introduction to the complicated history of the Balkans.

WALKING TOUR

After a short break, we took an 8 minutes bus ride to a view point halfway up the steep slopes of Herceg Novi. Founded in 1382, the city was formerly called Castel Nuovo (new castle) due to its many fortresses. 

The town is appropriately known as the “city of stairs”. There are lots of them - mostly old and a little slippery, mostly without handrails. Armed with walking sticks, we worked our way down the hillside.

The notorious Kanli Kula (“bloody tower”) fortress.

 
Except for watching one’s step, the streets are pretty safe - no vehicular traffic can get through the twisty, steep lanes. 

Main square and clock tower.

The clock tower was built in 1667 by the order of Turkish Sultan Mahmoud near a (now long gone) mosque. It was designed with mechanical clocks on several sides, to show the time for Muslim daily prayers. 

The pretty little church of Archangel Mihaila (Michael) is made of Croatian stone.

Like all Eastern Orthodox churches, the alter is hidden behind the iconostasis (a wall of icons and religious paintings). There are no pews, as the worshippers stand during the service. 

A museum of anchors retrieved from the bay was planned here, but progress is stalled.

The bastion of Forte Mere was built between the 14th and 17th centuries. An Austrian do-over in 1833 gave it its present look.

We had lunch at Konoba Feral, a seafood restaurant on the Pet Danica promenade we walked along yesterday. 

- lightly fried calamari and octopus, seafood tagliatelle and a scoop of something resembling seafood paella 

- I should have taken a photo of the food

Boat excursion in the Adriatic around Herceg Novi Bay

Looking back towards Herceg Novi as we headed to the island of Mamula

The small island of Mamula is just visible from our hotel. 

- 19th century Austrian circular fort covers most of the island

- used as a concentration camp during World War II, especially for prisoners from the surrounding area. Known for torture and cruelty.

- now being carefully restored and converted - against the protests of those once imprisoned there - into a luxury beach resort

During the 1970s, the Yugoslav military built camouflaged submarine tunnels along the coast of Montenegro to hide their small boats and submarines from spy planes and satellites.

Around the length of a football filled and about 30 feet deep, the adventurous can swim to the end and back. 

- might want a waterproof headlamp!

Herceg Novi hugs the coastline, with the black mountains looming above.

Forte Mere from the water.

The boat dropped us off near our hotel, so we could stroll back to the hotel along the Pet Danica at our leisure. 

2023 Balkans - Day 1 Herceg Novi, Montenegro

Our departure from Frankfurt this morning was a little more chaotic than we’d hoped. We caught a shuttle from the adjacent hotel, got off at the correct terminal, and, instead of checking in and proceeding in an orderly fashion to our gate, we entered a worm hole. There are literally hundreds of check-in counters (we saw numbers over 800) and needed assistance finding the two allotted to Croatian Air. There was one person checking in the entire flight. We passed security, went through the wrong passport control and eventually ended up in a line for immigration where our passports were stamped for the second time. At this point, we were on the wrong side of security and had to start over. We finally made it to our gate as they were boarding. 

Greg was also a bit flummoxed because his iPad, with all his puzzle and gaming apps, was left at Tina’s in Ronshausen. We will figure out how to get it back later.

We flew Croatian Air to Dubrovnik, an hour and a half flight. I had hoped for an aerial glance of Dubrovnik’s famous city walls, but the the closest I saw was a long dark dragon of an island, blowing puffs of clouds along the coast. 

We were met outside baggage claim by a driver who collected a half dozen of us and took us to the bus where other members of our group were already waiting. It was a short drive from the Dubrovnik airport to the Croatian-Montenegro border, where our passports were collected, stamped and returned to us.

Another few minutes brought us to the outskirts of Herceg Novi. Our hotel is on the bay, with a nice terrace. There was no electricity, however, throughout the city. The hotel must have generators for some functions, as the elevators were working, but we have no electricity in our room. We were told the power will be back at 8 tonight - we shall see. Apparently the district does this on a scheduled basis, to reduce energy usage. 

We had 4 hours to kill before our orientation meeting, so I washed a few clothes in the sink and we took a walk along the shore. A pedestrian street lined with shops and restaurants wandered along the coast. The 5 km (3 mile) promenade is called Setaliste Pet Danica, after five young women named Danica who died during World War II. There are no natural sand beaches here, though our hotel has an artificial little beachlet. Most of the bathing areas are cement; some are native pebbles. 

View from our hotel roof. Old Herceg Novi is across the bay. 

The weather was good, the stray cats friendly and the scenery lovely. But my favorite thing was this little guy walking through a long tunnel, who then purposefully crossed the walkway to climb a long flight of stone stairs. I’d never seen a wild hedgehog before and was charmed.

After an orientation/get-acquainted meeting, we had a group dinner in the hotel. We’ll be a party of 16, plus our guide, driver and occasional local guides. It should be an interesting group, as these parties usually are - some lawyers, an artist, NASA engineer, other scientists, teachers, etc. 

Road Scholar has been reminding (warning?) us for months that the activity level for this tour is “Keep the Pace”. Several hours on foot each day, cobblestones, many stairs. They even emailed some exercises to prepare for the trip! It does appear to be a pretty fit group. Hoping I’m not out of my league. 

We’ll be visiting the five Balkan countries circled below, zigging and zagging across borders (we’ll enter and depart Croatia three different times) as we progress. We’ll have to wait for another trip to experience Kosovo, Albania and Macedonia. 

Greg thoughtfully made maps to track our progress. The black lines show the ground we’ve covered each day, while the blue lines show where we’ve already been. So, for today, we landed at the Dubrovnik airport in Croatia and were shuttled across the border to our hotel in Herceg Novi, Montenegro. 

As our group leader, Srdjan Borkovic, wrote to us, the Balkans are a huge mosaic with a million pieces. Even natives can’t put them all together. The history evolved from complex interactions over millennia. It runs from prehistoric times through multiple empires and religions: Illyrian (Indo-European peoples who lived here in antiquity), Roman, Byzantine, Arabic, Ottoman, Yugoslav, Croatian, Serbian, Austrian, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, etc. The various ethnic and religious peoples at times have fought bitterly; today it would be called genocide. At other times, they lived in peace. I am not going to attempt to untangle the interwoven histories of all these peoples, but look forward to learning more about them from Srdjan. By training, he is a history professor and should be an good guide to these beautiful, complicated, countries.

2023 Balkans - Prologue - Germany

We spent the last 4 days visiting our friends, Tina and Annabelle, in Germany, before proceeding to the Balkans Road Scholar trip. They live in the village of Ronshausen, a pretty little village of 2,400 in Hesse. 

Tina grew up here, and moved back in 2019 to live in and renovate the house in which she grew up. 

The village is old - first mentioned nearly a millenium ago in 1061. It was abandoned several times during the Thirty Years’ War in the 1600s and the Seven Years’ War a century later, but by 1780, it was mentioned as a “big village” of 468 inhabitants. 

They have a delightful dog, Luna, who was acquired from a circus as a COVID puppy. She is friendly and very smart, already understanding German much better than I do. 

We spent our first jet-lagged afternoon on a nice ramble through the surrounding countryside. We walked down the main street, up to the cemetery where Tina’s parents and grandfather are buried, and past fields of young oats and bright yellow rapeseed (which we’d seen from the air while flying into Frankfurt).

There was also, of course, a bit of geocaching. Greg introduced Annabelle’s father, Enno, to geocaching many years ago when Annabelle was a toddler. And now Enno and Annabelle geocache together. 

The next morning, we had a super breakfast at home and a lazy morning until it was time to pick up Annabelle from school. Her school day is from 7:50 to 1:10 daily, and she’s home for lunch after school. She usually takes the train to and from school, but we were going on a field trip to Wartburg castle. Much of the half hour drive paralleled the former border between East and West Germany, until we arrived in the town of Eisenach. 

Wartburg sits high above the town. It was the first German castle named as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In its citation, it was described as “the ideal castle of the feudal period in Central Europe, blending harmoniously with its wooded surroundings, perched on a spur 200 meters (650 ft - or roughly 65 stories) above the surrounding countryside.”  

The Südturm (south tower), built in the 1400s, has an external staircase. There is a sign at the base of the tower cautioning that in case of thunder, everyone must descend immediately. Of course, as soon as we emerged from at the top, we heard the first rumblings of thunder. We took a quick look and photos, and obediently headed back down. 

From the top of the square tower. 

Greg on the staircase.

Two historic personages and one event are most associated with Wartburg. Saint Elisabeth of Hungary was brought here as a small child in 1011, and was betrothed to the landgrave of Thuringia, Ludwig IV, at age 14. She had three children, living an ascetic life modeled after Francis of Assisi. She founded hospitals and cared for the poor and sick. After her husband died in the Crusades, she moved to a monastery and continued ministering to the sick.

Inside the main palace, the room now called Elisabeth’s bower was decorated in glass mosaic in the early 1900s. The room depicts scenes from the saint’s life.

In the early 1200s, a renowned contest - or Battle of the Bands - between poets and singers was held in the Hall of Minstrels. The legend has been commemorated in many works, most famously in Wagner’s opera, “Tannhäuser”. 

Perhaps most famously, Martin Luther spent the better part of year taking refuge at Wartburg. After nailing his 95 Theses to the door of his church in Wittenberg and being excommunicated by the pope as a heretic, Luther sought safety and refuge behind the walls of the fortress. It was here, living under a pseudonym, that he translated the New Testament from Greek into German. The room in which he worked is stark. We were startled to see the pages of the book occasionally turn, and to hear a slight cough, or a sigh emerge from the room. 

Other sights in the castle:

A few of the famous (so we were told) white Wartburg pigeons. Tina calls them wedding pigeons.

On the way out of Eisenach, I asked Tina to drive by the birthplace of J.S. Bach. 

In honor of Bach, I even am allowing my photo in the blog (sitting on the wall)

We walked to breakfast in town the next day (Saturday). German bakeries are great!

There was a lot of discussion about what we’d do with the rest of the day, but we’d gotten a late start in the morning and Annabelle had homework to wrap up before Sunday’s festivities (Annabelle’s confirmation), so we ended up talking and napping, and watched a little of the coronation parade. Some friends who arrived in town for tomorrow’s celebration stopped by. We met other friends of Tina’s for dinner in Rotenburg an der Fulda. It would have been interesting to stroll around in the daylight, but even at night, the narrow streets of half-timber houses in the old walled city had a character all their own. 

This morning (Sunday) was Annabelle’s confirmation. We traveled to their Evangelical church about a half hour away and watched as 8 kids were confirmed. It was different than a Catholic or Episcopal ceremony - no bishop or hierarchy involved. Very nice, and to our surprise, several hymns (with which we were unfamiliar) were in English. 

This is Tina’s sister, her niece Christine and her family. We spent a lot of time getting acquainted and laughing with them at the confirmation party, and hope to see them in the US in a couple of years. We’d love to show them around the NE corridor!

We said goodbye and warm thanks to Tina, Annabelle and Luna. Annabelle’s father, Enno, kindly drove us two hours to our hotel near the Frankfurt airport, from which we’ll depart in the morning for the next part of our trip. We stopped en route at a restaurant in Wiesbaden, where we got to meet Enno’s friend, Petra, and their little dog, Boomer. It was nice to have some time with them, as we’ve seen Enno several times over the years (including in the US) and always enjoy his company.

So now we are settled in and ready to switch gears for the Balkans tomorrow.