The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Pint-sized Montenegro has all Europe’s best bits
With mountains, lakes, posh hotels, cool cities and excellent wine, this country is a microcosm of the continent’s highlights,
Awarm glow radiates from the stone walls of Baroque palaces in the late afternoon sun, and picturesque Juliet balconies cast their shadow. Across the single narrow road from the Heritage Grand hotel, a restored 17th-century Venetian palazzo, waterfront restaurants gear up for the evening. Crustaceans stare balefully from tanks, and the appetising aroma of grilled catch-of-the-day wafts past. Out in the water sit two small islands, crowned by churches: one broodingly Byronic, encircled by cypresses; the other, the luminous and legend-steeped Our Lady of the Rocks – silent, now that the tourists have left. I sit, with a glass of chilled local wine and local prosciutto from Njeguši, crystalline waters lapping at my feet, to watch the sun set beyond the Verige strait. As the Byzantines once flung a chain across the Bosphorus to save Constantinople from the Ottomans, so too did the locals across this narrowest point of Boka Bay in 1624, to protect their riches from the pirates of Barbary.
I am in Perast, Montenegro, a chameleon of a country the size of Northern Ireland, coloured by a succession of occupiers. Greeks, Illyrians, Romans, Turks, Spanish, Venetians, Napoleon, the Austro-Hungarian Empire – all have left their mark, in a rich Byzantine, Moslem and Catholic heritage untouched by the ravages of the Balkan wars.
In Ulcinj, in the south, I walked among a mainly Albanian population on ancient Illyrian walls. In Old Bar, I sipped freshly pressed pomegranate juice and drank Turkish coffee made in tiny beaten copper pots, at the foot of an abandoned village – its atmospheric ruins have borne witness to history since the fifth century. I drove up dizzying hairpin bends to reach the Orthodox Ostrog Monastery, camouflaged within a sheer vertical cliff, but in the innermost lobe of Boka Bay – where the Adriatic Sea cleaves the mountains to form a huge inkblot of four interconnecting coves – you could fancy yourself in the Republic of Venice, under whose protection, from the early 15th century to 1797, merchants and ship-owners grew rich. In fact, Perast was so famed for her maritime skills, that Peter the Great dispatched his Princes to study at the local naval academy.
If Montenegro is a cultural microcosm of Europe, her natural blessings – rugged, pine-blanketed mountains, virgin forests, and cerulean waters – inspired Yugoslav’s President Tito to turn the 15th-century fortified fishermen’s island of Sveti Stefan into a glittering showcase for his Communist regime. A new hotel opened in July 1960 and a slew of crowned heads and Hollywood royalty poured in. “Margaret and Snowdon”, read the hotel’s Libro d’Oro (roll of honour), among which could also be found warm words from film director Milos Forman, and chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer’s spidery scrawl. Tito himself, no shrinking violet, occupied the former Palace of Queen Marija Karadordevic, Villa
Milocer, just across the promontory. But, by 2004, when I first stayed on the island, Sveti Stefan had lost its lustre, its crumbling stones bathed in the rosy hue of nostalgia as louche Balkan mafijosi roamed its picturesque lanes. Locals spoke of the good ol’ days – of Burton and Taylor “always arguing: drinking and arguing”, or of “reports of screaming from Sidney Poitier’s suite in the middle of the night – but it turned out he was rehearsing his lines”. Most fondly remembered was Sophia Loren, a regular guest, who once left her table to don an apron and enter the kitchens. “She didn’t like our pasta,” said former employee Diki Kazanegra. “So she taught the chef how to make her favourite spaghetti carbonara – al dente. For years afterwards, we were known for making the best pasta in Yugoslavia.”
With independence in 2006 came foreign investment and glamour. Leading Montenegro’s renaissance was Aman Resorts (which painstakingly restored Sveti Stefan and Vila Milocer), and Porto Montenegro, a sophisticated residential community and resort, famed for its superyacht marina – the largest in Europe – where a cocktail o’clock passeggiata (stroll) rivals any on the Costa Smeralda or the Côte d’Azur.
I stayed at the new kid on the block – the no-expense-spared One&Only over the bay at Portonovi, a marina and residential development where Novak Djokovic recently bought an apartment (the tennis star has history with Sveti Stefan having married on the island in 2014). It offers arguably the country’s best beach set-up, with you’d-neverknow-it-was-imported fine sand, multiple pools, and huge sun loungers with baskets of cooling spritzers, water and suncream. From Portonovi, a boat sped me to the Blue Cave, whose electric-turquoise waters leave Capri’s Blue Grotto in the shade. And thence, like a 1950s film star, deep into Kotor Bay, past fishing hamlets and the exclusive waterfront villas of Ljuta (Djokovic bought one of these, too), to the Unesco-listed medieval fortified town of Kotor, for a stroll after the cruise ships had left and the inhabitants emerged from hiding. For Montenegro also shares the curse of other Mediterranean jewels, such as Venice, Dubrovnik, and Rhodes: flag-waving guides and unspeakable crowds jamming the maze of cobbled streets, taking selfies in churches, scaring the legion of cats. The solution: go after hours or off-season.
Above all, it is the contrasts offered by Montenegro that delight: the collision of old and new, of local and cosmopolitan, of heavenly and earthly pursuits. Within an hour of the French-riviera sophistication of Lustica, I found myself in Lake Skadar, one of Montenegro’s five national parks, hammering on a locked monastery door on a tiny island. Father Gregory, a sprightly 70-year-old, has lived here – alone, but for his bad-tempered cat, Herodias – for 30 years, and singlehandedly restored the little 14th-century church, destroyed by the Turks. Strange to think this tiny backwater once housed a famous scriptorium, whose books are now in Venice and Berlin. White-haired and twinkly-eyed, he plied me with homemade liqueurs and jams from the fruits in his garden. With no electricity, he spends his days in contemplation, reading, and carving exquisite inlaid wooden crosses, each one unique. On seeing my journal, he brought out his own, in neat script, containing three decades of wisdom. “I call it ‘Thoughts of an Idle Monk’,” he laughed.
I left Father Gregory with a pang of regret, and drove back via Mount Lovcen on the treacherous 26-switchback road, the better to view the craggy coastline below, pitted with bays and coves of opalescent waters.
“At the birth of our planet, the most beautiful encounter between the land and the sea must have happened at the coast of Montenegro,” wrote Lord Byron in 1875. And after even a glimpse, who could fail to agree?