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.
