Memories of MONTENEGRO
Where the plum brandy flows and life is easy
From where Dr. Dean Jobecivit sits beneath the cypresses in the lakeside village of Virpaza, Montenegro, life is good.
But years ago, during Yugoslavia's civil wars, being an outspoken pacifist led to threats of assassination. Today, the conflict is a distant memory. The doctor has simpler priorities. There's the shot glass of fiery plum brandy called slivovitz at hand, and wedges of cheese-filled phyllo pastries called burek that serve as breakfast for people of the western Balkans. And there are stories to tell: the submerged ancient town he and archeological friends have recently been diving on at the bottom of nearby Skadar Lake; the fate of the region's endangered Dalmatian pelicans; and the countless medieval Montenegrin villages for whom he serves as the only physician.
Most importantly, there's the future of his 14-year-old country, little known to most, an alpine and beach-lined anomaly: a place, in fact, where war never came; and publications like Lonely Planet and the New York Times have listed as one of the top travel destinations in the world.
Lying on the Adriatic just south of the famous Croatian city of Dubrovnik and just north of Albania, Montenegro is tiny — about one-fifth the size of New Brunswick. It's a land where travellers confront flocks of bell-wearing, road-blocking sheep. Or unsigned nudist beaches along an aquamarine sea. Or flower-filled alpine meadows of the Durmitor massif — with 2,500 metre peaks above. Or the untrammelled ruins of civilizations past.
For Montenegro has, for millenniums, sat at the crossroads of European history — with Greece to the southeast, Turkey and the Ottomans beyond that, Rome and Venice to the west, and the Austro-hungarians to the north. Each has left — in walled towns like Kotor, in the cuisine, in the potpourri of religions and customs — its mark on the country's 650,000 people.
For most who explore Montenegro, the journey begins on the Adriatic's Gulf of Kotor and the twisting coastal road that leads to Kotor Stari Grad, a fabulous World Heritage city and a smaller — and less touristy — version of Croatia's fearsomely crowded Dubrovnik.
Built almost 1,000 years ago, Kotor sits within 10-metre-high fortress walls that enclose a maze of narrow, cobblestone alleys and sunny plazas, dozens of outdoor cafés, and the red-tile roofed houses of long-ago traders for whom the bayside town served as port.
No Kotor alleyway goes straight for long; no turnings are marked. Getting lost is inevitable. But serendipity leads inevitably to an identifiable Romanesque church whose dim interior smells of centuries of incense and candle wax. Or to airy, pigeon-filled piazzas with rainbow-coloured gelato for sale here and seafood restaurants — trout is the national specialty — over there and prowling cats everywhere.
The two-lane road that leaves Kotor provides me and my companion with our first intimations of the thrill of driving Montenegro's vertiginous interior.
There are switchbacks upon switchbacks. And endless hillside wineries, marked by discreet signs naming the vintner — with none of the hype of the rest of southern Europe.
Kids sell cherries along the roadside. And shops in tiny, slate-roofed mountain villages have home-smoked hams displayed in their windows, or fresh-baked bread and pastries, or handmade cheeses. There are sheep-prompted traffic jams. Goat-prompted traffic jams. Even one slowdown caused by runaway pigs. And at the most awesome hairpin turns: there's enough uninterrupted sky beyond the road's unguarded verge for wayward vehicular passengers to have — while falling — sufficient airtime to recite the entire 23rd Psalm.
In fact, all around: ridges and ranges of forested, blue-black mountains, which, in fact, give the country its name: Monte Negro.
The village of Žabljak (pop. 4,200) sits on a high plain amid the country's rugged, 39,000-hectare Durmitor National Park. It's Montenegro's leading natural attraction. Dozens of jagged peaks rise directly above the town, and the adventurous must choose from numerous alpine opportunities.
Scores of hiking trails lead into the region's 18 lakes; and countless rock climbing routes are mapped for the intrepid. There are horseback rides amid fields of yellow gentian, harebell, violets, and daisies.
There's rapids-filled Tara Canyon — at 1,300 metres, Europe's deepest — that can be approached by kayak or white-water raft or by leaping off the Tara Canyon Bridge from the seventh highest bungee jump in the world.
There's paragliding from nearby bluffs. I had no interest in aerial histrionics, choosing instead to hike one afternoon the easy 10 km trail around exquisite Black Lake, while my companion went horseback riding nearby. As we can both now attest: the dramatic landscape within Durmitor has the appearance, down to the edelweiss, of the Swiss Alps.
At dinner that evening in Žabljak's rustic Restoran Durmitor — as at every Montenegrin meal — the food was superb.
As suits a country that has seen the Turks, Italians, Austrians, Serbs, and Hungarians pass through at one time or another, the local cuisine is a curious mixture of cultures. It blends Mediterranean cooking — featuring Turkish-style rice pilafs and Greek tomato-feta salads — and Slavic-hungarian cooking featuring a garlicky, red bell pepper-and-eggplant ajvar sauce on dishes like mućkalica, a Montenegrin goulash, or cevapcici, a delicious homemade sausage.
For those of a sunny, hedonistic bent, Montenegro's southern coast — especially the 70-kilometre stretch between Budva and the Albanian border — is where the sun seekers and the party-hardy go. Tiny baylets contain pocket beaches and rocky shelves large enough for two, while most visitors head to coastal Ulcinj, which has resorts, water sports, bars and sandy, 12-kilometre Veliki Plaža (Big Beach), the longest on the Adriatic.
But for me, the road heads inland, to Virpazar, to The Doctor, and to enormous Skadar Lake, home to 280 species of birds including the humungous Dalmatian pelican. It is somnolent, lakeside Virpazar that's the best part of this subtropical region of Montenegro. Nothing much happens unless one makes it happen.
One morning, we drive switchbacks into the surrounding mountains where medieval fortresses loom and antique villages cling to steep ravines. Men work the hay fields with scythes. A stick-wielding shepherd in cloth-cap and well-patched pants nods as he steers his goats off the pavement. Cuckoos issue their familiar call. And creekside watermills, used for centuries to grind wheat, stand abandoned, having fallen silent only recently.
Along the back roads of rural Montenegro, it often seems time stopped 150 years ago.
Sitting outdoors with The Doctor on a June evening in Virpazar and listening to his accounts of what life and nature and war have taught him, it's easy to yield to the insights he has acquired in his years.
Born into a famous political family, The Doctor is known as the man who tried to stop the wars that shattered Yugoslavia almost 30 years ago. Exiled for his pacifism, he had to wait a decade before returning to Virpazar.
“One's home is never small,” he says, translating a Montenegrin proverb, and looking around his little 12th-century village.
Candlelight illuminates café tables in the treed bazaar that
evening. Neighbours chat. An unseen owl hoots. And a cool onshore breeze from the lake roils the maples as a distant lightning storm passes to the north.
“Here, I have a little bit of everything,” he says of the place he loves, and which his father and grandfather loved long before him. “Here I find balance.”
As visitors often do, he fishes the lake for trout and watches the migrating birds arriving in flocks of 100,000 each spring and fall.
And when called, he's doctor to the people of the 70 villages that surround the lake. And when there's no priest, he offers the last rites — just as his physician father did when he lived here.
“A lot of modern people live a virtual life,” he says, wiggling his thumbs as if playing a video game. “There's no connection to nature. To reality. They're unhappy and don't know why. There's something about simpler cultures, about what they know, that we need to relearn.
“They live within nature. They're not apart. Connectivity's what's important. You belong to a place and your home is never small.”