Cetinje, the capital the size of a village

The road from the Bay of Kotor up to Cetinje climbs through around twenty-five hairpin bends in a few kilometres, gaining height fast enough that the bay below shrinks to a map-like sliver within minutes and the vegetation changes from Mediterranean olive and cypress to bare limestone and mountain scrub before the summit of the pass. It is not a subtle transition, and it was not meant to be: for most of Montenegro's history as an independent or semi-independent state, this climb was the practical distance between the exposed, contested coast and a mountain capital deliberately sited where an invading army would think twice about the effort of reaching it.

Cetinje sits in a small karst valley below Mount Lovćen, and for over four centuries, on and off, it served as the capital of a Montenegrin state that spent most of that time as one of the very few parts of the Balkans never fully conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Its rulers for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were prince-bishops, the Petrović-Njegoš dynasty, who combined secular authority with the leadership of the Orthodox church in a single office, an arrangement that concentrated both religious and political legitimacy in one family at a time when Montenegro had few other institutions capable of holding the country together against the pressure of its neighbours.

A prince-bishop who wrote one of the great epics of the region

The most celebrated of these prince-bishops, Petar II Petrović-Njegoš, ruled from 1830 until his death in 1851, and is remembered today at least as much for his writing as for his governance. His epic poem, The Mountain Wreath, published in 1847 and still widely read and taught across the region, wove Montenegro's history, folklore and its long struggle against Ottoman pressure into a work that has shaped the country's sense of its own identity for well over a century since. Njegoš is buried not in Cetinje itself but at the summit of Mount Lovćen, in a mausoleum reached by several hundred steps and reconstructed in the twentieth century, from which, on a clear day, much of the Montenegrin coast and interior is visible at once.

A capital that stayed small on purpose, and by circumstance

Cetinje never grew into a large city, partly because the surrounding karst terrain offers little room or fertile land for expansion, and partly because its role was always more symbolic than economic; the country's trade and population centres lay elsewhere, closer to the coast or, later, at Podgorica, which eventually took over as the country's administrative capital. What Cetinje kept, as a result, is a small, walkable town with a disproportionate number of former embassies, several of them handsome nineteenth-century buildings left over from the era when European powers maintained full diplomatic missions to a mountain state most of their own citizens would have struggled to place on a map, plus a royal palace, a national museum and a monastery holding relics said to include a hand of St John the Baptist, among the more venerated objects in Orthodox Christianity.

A day trip up from the coast covers Cetinje comfortably, with time to spare for the drive back down through the same switchbacks, though a longer stay inland gives a clearer sense of a Montenegro that has very little to do with beaches at all.

Nearby Rijeka Crnojevića, a small settlement on the river of the same name a short distance from Cetinje, adds a gentler postscript to the mountain drama of the climb up from the coast: a slow, meandering waterway running down towards Skadar Lake, the largest lake in southern Europe, shared between Montenegro and Albania and known for its birdlife, including pelicans that nest among its reed beds each summer. It is a markedly different landscape from the bare karst around Lovćen, low, green and quiet, and a reminder that Montenegro's small size hides a genuinely varied set of terrains within a short drive of one another.