Bar, Montenegro

Bar, Montenegro

There are two ways to leave Podgorica airport. The first is by taxi. The second is by walking past droves of disgruntled taxi drivers who express vocally their annoyance at not having secured one's custom. I opted for the latter, and found myself following a scrubby trail alongside the airport road, which heads west before joining the road towards the capital. After about ten minutes' walking, I reached the makeshift Aerodrom station, which consists of a few ramshackle piles of rubble and broken glass inside a faded yellow concrete bus shelter that smells faintly of urine. Seven people boarded the northbound train to Podgorica at 1010, leaving me alone before I was joined by four others for the 1038 to the southern coastal town of Bar. In between, the railway line was host to a long double decker freight train bearing a large number of factory new Fiats on their way south, and there was even a man (presumably a worker, not a joyrider) sitting in the driver's seat of the final car on the lower deck at the rear of the train.

The train was unlabelled but simple enough to identify, as there is only a single track that switches direction every so often, and in any case there is only one route south. For the hour's journey I paid €2 and the conductor wrote out a ticket - a task that seems so much more laborious than merely pressing a couple of buttons and having your machine do the work for you, as I am used to seeing the British National Rail workers do. The September sun streamed into the train on its way south, winding through ugly little settlements close to Podgorica, then alongside a road where every so often a car park or lay by would play host to vendors in stalls labelled 'smokve' - 'figs' -, past the marshy fringes of Lake Skadar, and finally through a long tunnel under the lofty mountain peaks that separate the flat lands by the lake from the southeast coast.

Looking back towards Podgorica airport (hidden among the trees)

The charming terminal and tastefully littered open-air concourse of Aerodrom station

Lake Skadar. Albania lies out of sight and beyond the marshes on the left

On the way, I reflected on how I had come to be here. Three months earlier, I had spent ten days travelling in the northern half of the countries often labelled as ‘the Balkan states’. Having stopped off in Ljubljana in Slovenia en route, I proceeded to Serbia’s capital Belgrade and then Sarajevo and Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Latterly, with my friend Andrew, I visited Zagreb, Plitvice National Park, Zadar, Dubrovnik and Split, all in Croatia. While in Dubrovnik, I had nipped over the border to Kotor at the northern end of the Montenegrin coast. This region had really intrigued me and, following the conclusion of that tour, I was extremely keen to explore further. I would ideally like to see Slavonia (inland northern Croatia), Serbia and Bosnia more thoroughly, but first, I decided to try and visit a few more new countries. In late September, a conveniently placed midweek holiday in the Czech Republic and an as yet incomplete work schedule meant that I could take off a couple of days and have slightly more than a week away. From Prague, the selection of cheap flights is limited, but nearby Berlin offered a cut-price fare to Montenegro’s capital Podgorica.

At a couple of days’ notice, I thus researched an arranged an itinerary covering the former Yugoslav states I had not yet visited – Kosovo and Macedonia – and travel back to Prague overland stopping in Bulgaria and Romania. The latter, being largely north of the Danube, is not frequently included in ‘the Balkans’ but I have chosen to include it anyway. From my plane, I had fantastic views of the mountainous Bosnian-Serbian border, then emerged over the peaks of Montenegro before flying out and back over the huge Lake Skadar during the descent, and finally landed at Podgorica’s airport. Reading up about Podgorica revealed that it is among the dullest European capitals, and even that everywhere else in Montenegro is more exciting than it. The coast promised a more interesting day including a visit to the earthquake-destroyed ruins of an old city.

The train terminated at Bar (although at no point was this, or any other stop, announced). I checked the timetable for my return trip north later in the day, and then set off to find the sea. It was a simple enough walk to the port, where there was a small ferry terminal (services mostly to Bari in Italy) and a couple of what appeared to be Montenegrin navy vessels. (If they were something else, they were in any case deep grey and military-looking.) As I followed what was now a promenade north, the boats morphed into dinghies and one or two small yachts, before these disappeared and there was just a long white shingle beach.

A new church being built on the edge of Bar

Bar's tropical-looking promenade 

Here most of the voices I could hear were Russian (which sounds recognisably different from the South Slavic languages) and indeed I heard a smattering of Russians all day. Perhaps due to these outsiders, there seemed to be incongruous displays of wealth here and there, primarily in the form of smart, executive, black or grey Mercedes or Audis, where the majority of locals had shabbier looking vehicles that certainly were not new.

The highlight of this part of the city was Hram Svetog Jovana Vladimira, an attractive Orthodox church, whose exterior featured two square white towers and an eye-catching golden dome on which the sun gleamed, and whose interior walls were covered with beautiful rich decoration in the manner of the churches of that denomination in general. On my way back to the beachfront, I passed through the small garden of Dvorac Kralja Nikole, the palace of King Nikola. 'Palace' was definitely an overstatement, though it was a pretty house in a nice setting. King Nikola’s identity was not exactly explained, though subsequent investigation tells me he was the ruler of Montenegro from 1860 until 1918, serving the final eight of those years as King Nikola I. Alas, my itinerary did not allow me to linger to see the museum about the local history of Bar County, as I was driven to press on by the lure of other sights.

Hram Svetog Jovana Vladimira

The lavishly decorated interior

A ruined building and a mosque seen on the road from Bar to Stari Bar

A mosque, just outside the ruined old city, Stari Bar

Chief among these was the remains of Stari Bar, the old city of Bar, which is perched upon an outcrop a few miles inland. My walk there began by retracing my steps almost to the station, before abandoning the main road and meandering uphill along smaller lanes. To begin with, there was the pleasant aroma of pine, but this was overtaken by the less savoury odour of the decaying rubbish that was strewn around sets of roadside skips, and which had also attracted a particularly mangy stray dog. All along this route, the houses were shabby and run-down in a manner that seemed typical of homes in other parts of the region I have visited. The approach to the old fortress, however, was a different story, with the last couple of hundred metres lined with souvenir shops and restaurants with bilingual menus. I paid €2 to explore the ruins, and although there was little in the way of interpretation, it was worthwhile for the views and the magic of being almost alone and surrounded by the remnants of a once great citadel. Initially settled in the 6^th or 7th century BC, Stari Bar was part of a network of city-states in this part of the Mediterranean, and like nearby Dubrovnik, was a target of Venetian hostilities. It was overrun by the Turks in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the major consequence of this appears to have been the conversion of the city's churches into mosques. The enormous legacy of Ottoman rule in this part of Europe is evident in the large Muslim communities of Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo. Here too, there were several mosques visible within a short distance of the old city walls, catering to a mixture of Slavic Muslims and ethnic Albanians.

Efforts to repair and preserve the old city following the 1979 earthquake stalled in the 1980s, but the most significant archæological remains such as the old stone aqueduct have been rebuilt. Stari Bar is undergoing a process of 'resustication', an information board helpfully told me, and there were numerous signs insisting essentially that the displays would be more informative if the restoration project had more funding. Investment to help make the experience a more enriching one for future visitors would certainly not go amiss. However, the cynic in me says that it should remain as it is; nearby Kotor's old fortress is more impressive, imposing and labyrinthine, but also thickly forested with tourists, largely patrons of the cruise ships that have made Kotor's deep water port a regular destination. I was enamoured with the tranquility of Stari Bar, and I only wish there were a happy medium in which this place could receive the funding required to make it an absorbing and intellectual experience, without prostituting itself to the hoi polloi.

Stari Bar

The Ottoman-built aqueduct was destroyed by the 1979 earthquake but has since been rebuilt

The foreboding mountains behind Stari Bar

Like the aqueduct, the clock tower collapsed but has been rebuilt, and is in far better condition now than most of the site's buildings

My next port of call was Stara Maslina (the old olive tree), which claims to be Europe's oldest tree and possibly also the world's oldest olive tree. It dates back over two thousand years and was a nice diversion and an interesting excuse to return to Bar station by a different route than that I took to reach Stari Bar. However, it doesn't hold the attention for long, and I was soon wending my way towards the station by means of back roads that smelled of gently rotting fruit.

A Yugo - Yugoslavia's iconic car - parked by a garage. Many people, especially in Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, still own and drive Yugos

Stara Maslina, the old olive tree

Traditional methods of drying hay meet modern tastes in housing design beneath Montenegro's ubiquitous mountains

Unfortunately, I was left with a last negative memory in the underpass below the railway line, which was filled with all manner of unsightly garbage and stank of manure and human waste. Close by, rummaging beneath a large bin, were three of the sweetest little puppies one could imagine, scrounging for food but also playfully scrapping with each other and softly whimpering towards me. In another world, they could have been beloved family pets but sadly they had been doomed to eke out a living from the rubbish the people of Bar leave after themselves.

At the station, a fat Montenegrin in an orange t-shirt sat beside me and tried to ask where I was heading. I stammered and replied 'ne razumijem... ne govorim crnogorski'. Through gesticulation and the odd Montenegrin word, we established that we were both bound for Podgorica (more or less the only train destination from Bar, unless one heads through the capital en route to Serbia), and that he knew on which track the train would appear (to call Bar’s tracks ‘platforms’ would be a gross exaggeration). We then established that he was in reality going to Aerodrom, so I conveyed to him in the same unorthodox fashion - relying mainly on the word 'jutro' ('morning') - that I had come from Aerodrom earlier in the day and had indeed flown in from Germany, although I was not a German but an 'anglesko'. Sadly, he spoke neither English nor German and with the arrival of the train, we went our separate ways. On the way, he produced a piece of rubbish and tossed it lazily towards a bin, missing it by a couple of feet but not budging to scoop it up and ensure it found its rightful place. I reflected that this attitude of cool indifference, though shown here on a very small scale, was the same as that which had filled the underpass with putrid garbage and condemned those delightful puppies to a hard life, and that it was this apparent unwillingness or inability to clean up after oneself that had given me my least pleasant experiences of this country.

I nodded off in the train on the return journey north, but was awake as we rattled across Lake Skadar, with the eponymous city of Shkodër (Skadar in Montenegrin) visible on the distant shore, in Albania, now the third country I have seen but not visited. I stepped off in Podgorica, a station that is replete with the rusting wrecks of other trains that ominously appear to have burnt out, which I hope is not indicative of a wider trend on the Montenegrin rail network. Taking the advice of the Internet, I had chosen to avoid Podgorica until now, and I was glad I had. There is nothing 'wrong' with it, per se, but it is hardly an inspiring place in contrast to the more diverse and charming cities of the region, and to the many ancient towns of Montenegro, which are often stunningly situated amongst its mountains.

Trg Vojvode Bećira Osmanagića (Vojvod Bećir Osmanagić Square), Podgorica

This mosque and these painted houses were about as exciting as Podgorica's old town got

Millennium Bridge (Most Milenijum)

Stari most

In the hour or so I had remaining until darkness descended, I covered just about everything I wanted to see, including a wander through the old part of the city, featuring mosques and traditional houses, during which I regularly had to dive onto the narrow pavement whenever a taxi screamed past. I crossed the Morača river, which cuts through the city at the bottom of a sizeable gorge. I recrossed it further upstream to view the new Millennium Bridge (Most Milenijum), which isn't a particularly original design but is at least more inspiring than much of Podgorica's bland architecture. Tracking the river, I then passed the presidential residence and descended some stone steps - the Skaline - to cross the pretty Turkish Stari most (Old Bridge) over the Ribnica river at its confluence with the Morača; a neat oasis in an otherwise dull city.

I sat for a while in Trg Republike (Republic Square) before finding a pizza for supper and returning to the bus station. At 2130, I departed for Pristina in a bus that seemed serviceable enough, but whose driver was moderately erratic and several times along the dark, winding mountainous roads, I feared we would plummet from some precipitous cliff and join the ghosts of other vehicles that must inevitably have met their end along such roads as this. Should I survive, I was into a bizarre oddity of the region, a disputed, Albanian-speaking, majority Muslim state that has been independent for just eight years: Kosovo.

River Morača, Podgorica