Montenegro

Montenegro sits on the Adriatic coast in southeast Europe, between Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania. It declared independence from Serbia in 2006 and remains outside the European Union, though the country uses the Euro as its de facto currency. The capital is Podgorica, the cultural and tourist heart is the walled town of Kotor on the Bay of Kotor, and the interior is dominated by the Dinaric Alps, with peaks above 2,500 metres in the Durmitor and Prokletije ranges.

Bay of Kotor

We came in for New Year’s Eve. The original plan was to spend the holiday with friends in Podgorica and fly back to Berlin, until a few days before the flight we realised that if we delayed the return by 48 hours, we could finally make the drive over to Kotor. The trip split cleanly in two: three days in the capital, then two on the bay.

The Bay of Kotor is locally called Boka, “the Bay”. It runs 28 kilometres inland from the Adriatic, hemmed in by two ridges of the Dinaric Alps. People often describe it as a fjord, which is geologically wrong (it is a submerged river canyon) but visually accurate enough that the comparison sticks. The bay together with its surrounding settlements has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1979 as the Natural and Culturo-Historical Region of Kotor.

The shoreline holds a string of old towns we did not have time to walk: Risan, Tivat, Perast, Prčanj, Herceg Novi. Each is a small port with its own Venetian-era churches and palaces. We stayed inside the walls of Kotor and shot the bay from above. Years later, while going back through the drive, I found the sunset panorama from the upper ramparts that I had never processed at the time. That frame is the photo at the top of this guide.

Kotor

Kotor is the walled medieval port at the head of the bay. The town’s first documented mention is 168 BC, when it sat inside the Roman province of Dalmatia, and the Old Town has since passed through Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman, Habsburg, and Napoleonic rule. Each layer left something visible: a gate, a church, a stretch of wall.

The headline experience for photographers is the climb up to the Castle of San Giovanni on St John’s Hill, but the Old Town at street level rewards an early morning of its own. The cats are part of the town’s identity (every souvenir shop sells postcards of them) and the small squares between churches and palaces empty out completely in the hour before sunrise. For a deeper street-level walk through every gate, square, and rampart, see our dedicated Kotor walkthrough.

The first frame I chased here was the daylight panorama from halfway up the climb, an image I had been carrying in my head since 2015 after seeing Elia Locardi’s version of the same view. From Berlin it is a long and inconvenient trip, which is why it took the New Year detour through Podgorica to finally get me up there.

The Old Town has three gates: the Sea Gate (the main entrance, built in 1555 under Venetian rule), the Northern Gate, and the larger Southern Gate. The Northern Gate was built in the 16th century to commemorate Kotor’s victory over the Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa, and it has held up remarkably well. A moat with turquoise water still runs along the wall beside it.

I shot the river-side gate at first light from the valley below St John’s Hill, in the half hour before sunrise. The position was chosen because it gave a clean line of sight up to the Kotor Fortress on the slope above the gate. After the frame, Daria and I went up onto the walls themselves and walked the full circuit, which is the part of Kotor most visitors skip.

A second New Year frame came from in front of the Sea Gate itself, with the festive lights still up and the streets empty. The Sea Gate on New Year’s morning is a quieter image than the fortress climb, but it is the one that captures why a winter trip to Kotor reads so differently from a summer trip.

Saint Tryphon Cathedral in Kotor

The Cathedral of Saint Tryphon was consecrated in 1166. An older church on the same ground had held the saint’s remains since the 10th century, and the locals still consider Tryphon the patron and protector of Kotor. The current Romanesque facade and twin towers are the building’s third or fourth iteration, since the cathedral has been damaged repeatedly by earthquakes over the centuries.

We arrived in front of the church a couple of days after New Year, which is why the festive lights were still strung along the surrounding buildings when I made the frame. The square in front of the cathedral is paved in pale marble, and at first light the stones reflect enough to read clearly even before the sun is fully up. I did not have time to climb the cathedral tower itself, which I now regret. Next visit.

Kotor Fortress in Montenegro

The fortress complex on St John’s Hill is what most photographers come for. Towers, ramparts, and the Castle of San Giovanni at the top together form one of the best-preserved medieval defensive systems in the Adriatic. The site has been occupied since Illyrian times, Emperor Justinian I rebuilt the fortifications in the 6th century, and the Venetians extended them in the late medieval period.

The climb is roughly 1,300 stairs to about 1,200 metres above the bay. Sections of the path are partially destroyed, the securing walls drop off in places, and the 1979 earthquake left damage that is still visible on the way up. On the way up I noticed the daytime composition formed by the ruined ramparts, which became its own frame: stone, sky, and the bay dropping away on the right.

I climbed twice in two days, once for the daylight frame and once to wait out the blue hour. On the second climb Daria ran up and down the upper staircase to stay warm while I held position with the camera. It was January, and the wind off the bay cuts through anything you brought from a Berlin winter.

The hero shot of the complex itself I made from the valley with a long lens, the Castle of San Giovanni from below, waiting for the late sun to land on the upper towers. On the first afternoon of our visit, with low rain clouds rolling in off the bay, I caught a different version of the same subject: the castle in cloud-cover, the upper ramparts half lost in weather.

Kotor Bay at Night in Montenegro

The picture I had been chasing from the top was the bay at the blue hour. By the time the sun set on the second evening I had it. Years later, going through the drive back home, I found a frame from the same vantage that I had not processed at the time, with the sky fully lit by the last of the sun. That is the photo at the top of this guide.

The night version stands on its own. The lit shoreline after dark reads as almost the same composition as the daylight panorama, except the geometry of the bay is now drawn in lamps along the waterline. Same vantage point, four hours of waiting, an entirely different photograph.

Podgorica

Podgorica is the smallest European capital we have visited. The city counts roughly 150,000 people inside the metropolitan area and feels closer in scale to a regional German Kreisstadt than to a European capital. The valley sits ringed by the dark line of the Montenegrin mountains, which read into almost every wide frame of the skyline, including the modernist cityscape from above that I made on the second afternoon.

What stayed with us about Podgorica was the people. Two days into the trip a friend reminded us of a 2013 incident: a Romanian bus crashed about 40 kilometres outside the city, and so many residents turned up to donate blood at the local hospitals that the doctors had to ask people to stop coming. Daria and I have used “it’s like in Montenegro” as shorthand for that kind of warmth ever since, when comparing how strangers treat us in other countries.

Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ

The Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ (Saborni Hram Hristovog Vaskrsenja) is the most prominent religious building in Podgorica. The exterior follows the Byzantine model closely enough that on first sight I assumed it was at least a century old, possibly contemporary with St Tryphon in Kotor. The construction actually began in 1993 and finished in 2013.

Inside the Resurrection Cathedral is where the building gives itself away. The frescoes look at first glance like standard High Byzantine work, until you start reading the figures. One of the wall paintings shows Marx, Engels, and Tito in hell. Once that detail registers, the rest of the iconography reorganises itself: this is a 21st-century church speaking to recent Montenegrin history, dressed in medieval clothing. The effect is unsettling in person, which I think is the point.

Millennium Bridge in Montenegro

The cable-stayed bridge over the Morača is the modern landmark of the Podgorica skyline. A pedestrian and road bridge known as the Millennium Bridge, it opened in 2005 and is still the most-photographed contemporary structure in the city. The cables are light grey, the pylons white, and against the dark mountains behind, the whole bridge reads as a clean graphic line.

I framed it from the riverside with the city centre in the background. The photograph reads more as a landscape than a cityscape because Podgorica’s skyline is short: the mountains take over most of the upper half of the frame. The contrast inside the picture is the actual subject. Communist-era towers on one side, modern residential blocks on the other, a 21st-century bridge in between. It is the most concise summary of the city I managed to put in one frame.

Vladimir Vysotsky Monument

Along the riverbank near the bridge stands a bronze statue of Vladimir Vysotsky, the Russian poet, singer, and actor who died in 1980. Vysotsky never lived in Montenegro, but he wrote a famous line about the country: “I regret in this life that I don’t have two roots, and I cannot name Montenegro as my second homeland.” Podgorica has very few monuments inside the city limits. That a Russian-language poet got one of them tells you something about how seriously Montenegrins took the regard.

The composition is as direct as the meaning. Bronze figure on yellow ground in a riverside park, the white pylons of the Millennium Bridge stacking up behind. I shot it on a sunny afternoon in late December.

Clock Tower (Sahat Kula) in Podgorica

The 17th-century Ottoman clock tower, called Sahat Kula in Montenegrin, dates to the Ottoman period and is one of the oldest surviving structures in the city. The tower is now legally protected as a cultural monument. A cross was added at the top of the tower at the end of the 19th century to mark the city’s transfer from Ottoman to Christian Montenegrin rule, though I was unable to fit it into the frame from the angle I shot.

What surprised me about Podgorica’s old centre was how residential it was. Walking out from the tower, the city blocks dissolve quickly into low houses and narrow streets. There is a restaurant called Pod Volat directly behind the tower that became our default lunch spot. Generous Montenegrin meat dishes, reasonable prices, no pretence. Worth the visit if you eat meat.

A short hike out of the centre takes you up Gorica Hill (in Montenegrin, Gorica means “small hill”, and Pod-gorica means “under the small hill”, which is where the capital gets its name). On top sits the small Orthodox chapel above Podgorica, the Church of St George, the oldest church in the city, dated by most sources between the 9th and 11th centuries. The church was closed when we visited, so we walked the surrounding graveyard instead. Headstones weathered enough that the inscriptions are partially illegible.

Where This Guide Doesn’t Go

Montenegro is small (about half the size of Belgium) but the country fits more landscape variety into that space than its size suggests, and most of it is missing from this guide. We did not photograph Durmitor National Park in the north, the Tara Canyon (the deepest in Europe by some measures), Lovćen above Kotor, or the coastal towns south of the bay: Budva, Sveti Stefan, Ulcinj, the Skadar Lake region. We also skipped the other UNESCO settlements around the Bay of Kotor itself: Perast, Prčanj, Risan, Tivat, Herceg Novi.

The trip was four days. The country deserves three weeks. What you have here is a deep look at two cities, not a complete inventory. When we go back, the missing regions are where we will start.

When to Visit Montenegro

The coast is Mediterranean, with August the hottest and busiest month. We visited at the end of December and into early January and found it close to ideal for photography: empty streets in Kotor, festive lights still up, and the kind of low winter sun that flatters stone facades. The trade-off in winter is that some upper sections of the Kotor Fortress path can be slick, and the climb takes more care.

May, June, and September are the strongest shoulder months. The bay is warm enough for swimming, the inland mountains are accessible, and Kotor has not yet filled with the cruise-ship crowds of high summer. July and August on the coast are crowded. The mountain interior, by contrast, is at its most usable then.

Food and Drink in Montenegro

Montenegrin cooking sits between Balkan and Mediterranean traditions. On the coast, expect grilled fish, octopus, prosciutto from Njeguši (a smoked ham aged in the mountain village of the same name), and the heavy local cheese. Inland in Podgorica, the menus skew toward grilled meats, ćevapi, pljeskavica, and stews like japrak. Pod Volat behind the Clock Tower is the Podgorica meat house we kept returning to.

On drinks, the country produces decent red wine from the indigenous Vranac grape, and the rakija (locally called loza) is everywhere. The currency is the Euro despite Montenegro not being in the Eurozone or the EU, which simplifies travel from anywhere else in Europe.

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