Black Mountain – Part 2

Hiking with the Tour Group

By James T. Carney
Photos by Detmar Straub

We caught our flight from London to Dubrovnik and took a van across the border and along the Adriatic coast to Petrovac. This part of Montenegro is a great tourist center in the summer; people – particularly Russians – flock there to enjoy the sun and the beach. Prior to the 2008 Great Recession, there had been a great building boom along the coast. The Great Recession ended that, leaving a huge number of half-finished apartment buildings between the road and the shore. Apparently, Montenegrins could not obtain financing for a whole building, so they financed construction on a stage-by-stage basis, which meant that the project was incomplete when the financing dried up.
    We arrived at our hotel in Petrovac in the last afternoon. We were greeted by a collection of feral kittens, which I fed every morning after breakfast. They were as likely to bite a person as to lick them. They were curious animals, and I spent some time following them around and observing them.
    The hotel was practically empty – think Saranac Lake and Lake Placid in the Adirondacks after Labor Day. The staff did give us a good lunch to take with us on each day’s hike. The group we were with included five English women who were close friends and made an annual hiking trip together. They were not at all cliquish, which was good. One Road Scholar trip I went on comprised 20 people, a number of whom formed a clique, which spoiled the typical camaraderie. We had a Scottish guide (who was for Scottish independence) who had, unfortunately, never been to Montenegro before. He guided us by maps, rather than by previous experience, and we would get lost on more than one occasion.

Our first full day in Montenegro we made an extremely wet hike to Serbian Orthodox St. Spyridon’s Chapel, which was surrounded by a small collection of farms. Adjacent to the chapel itself was a home for the aged nun who welcomed us out of the damp and the cold and gave us cups of the worse tea that I had ever drank. The weather was extremely cold and damp.
    After lunch we started a very steep descent that brought us down the mountain and close to Sveti Stefan, a small islet on which sits an exclusive luxury hotel supposedly inhabited by Russian mobsters. Needless to say, we did not attempt to enter.

    On the second day we went to the Tivat Peninsula, which is home to the ancient town of Perast, which in its heyday was home to a fleet composed of hundreds of galleys, but now has only a couple of dozen inhabitants and about a dozen churches.

    We took a boat from Perast to the artificial island Gospa od Škrpjela (“Our Lady of the Rocks,” home to a sumptuous church and a small seafarer’s museum.
    On our third day we went hiking on the Tivat peninsula climbing up Vrmac Hill and down to see the Bay of Kotor, which is actually a drowned river basin.

It is an extremely beautiful bay. As we climbed down the hill, we could see several huge cruise ships by the town of Kotor, one of the main stopping points for Adriatic cruises, which ordinarily depart Venice and proceed down the eastern (Yugoslav) side of the Adriatic. Kotor, and even Montenegro itself, lay on the boundary of the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic and frequently changed hands. After visiting the town, Det and I went up to the castle and then climbed even farther up the hill on which the castle sat.
    The fourth day we went south from Petrovac to explore the Montenegrin National Park of Lake Skadar. We also hiked down and up from the abandoned village of Poseljani, which was built along a bustling stream that once ran a number of flour mills. Then we rode on a boat on Lake Skadar, south of which lies Albania.
    That evening we had dinner in an interesting restaurant. Altogether, we had a good deal of very good local wine in Montenegro. All Montenegrin and Croatian wine is dark. There were literally no white wines.

    It rained the fifth and final day of our hiking trip, so we made a trip to Cetinje instead. Cetinje was the 19th century capital of Montenegro. Though founded in the 15th century, Cetinje is pretty much a 19th century town from an architectural standpoint; it isn’t big enough to be called a city, and the more prominent buildings house the embassies of the few foreign countries that felt they need to deal with Montenegro.

    Cetinje is, however, home to one of the largest monasteries in Europe. Monasticism has over the centuries played a greater role in the Greek church than in the Latin one.

Monasticism was eliminated in England during the Protestant Reformation, when King Henry VIII dissolved all of the monasteries and appropriated their property. Although I do not know for sure, I suspect that this may have happened in other Protestant lands as well. It didn’t happen at the same time in Spain, but I should note that the huge monastery we went through in our descent from the Pyrenees had been closed.
    That afternoon we went to explore the remnants of an abandoned medieval village whose name, unfortunately, I can’t remember. The village was quite extensive and remarkably well preserved, and Det and I spent some interesting time there. Then we returned to the hotel, as we did after each day’s outing, and had our farewell dinner with the tour group.

Copyright © 2020 by James T. Carney & Detmar Straub