Today we spent a few hours at the wonderful Old Town of Kotor. It was established 2,000 years ago.
It has been ruled by… “you name it, they ruled it!”
Square of the Weapons.
There was so much fighting throughout the Balkans , especially during the Ottoman Empire.
700 years. It ended in 1912 in Albania.
Venice was running Kotor for commerce. Albania fell to the Turks, but everyone else continued to fight. The ruler here allowed everyone to come and buy weapons, but they had to leave at a certain time.
If anyone did the wrong thing, they were subjected to public humiliation in the square.
Baroque palace.
With all the money flowing into the town from the weapons, 110 families became rich .
Pima family had the longest balcony here, apart from the Prince’s.
This family were extremely distinguished… poets, businessmen etc, but now they’ve died out.
This cathedral is the heart of Roman Catholic Montenegro.
Patron Saint of the town is St Tripun, a Greek teenager who was martyred in the 300’s for being a Christian. He had his head chopped off and everything.
It’s giving me Notre Dame vibes.
An earthquake scoring 7 on the Richter scale destroyed the town in the late 1970’s. It took them over 20 years to rebuild the Old Town.
They’ve done a very good job. This place is wonderful.
This little church was built in 1195 . It’s dedicated to St Luke.
Interestingly, Orthodox and Roman Catholic both share it, which doesn’t often happen.
3,000 souls are buried here. They were cremated before being interred here, with large numbers occurring during the Black Death.
After our guided tour, we had a couple of hours to wander around. Blogless Sandy wanted to climb a certain way up the mountain path to see the view over the city.
Not being a mountain goat, I wasn’t filled with glee about doing this, but I knew I’d regret it if we didn’t go. She pointed to a spot on the map and we set off.
This is as high as we got. There was a man charging 15 euros to go higher.
It was my lucky day! No way we were going to pay that.
There are sections of the old wall that you can walk on. We ambled along here,
This is very much a tourist town, but as you can see, people still live here.
Here’s a close up of the city walls as they wend their way up to the top of the hill where the fort is. Two thousand steps were mentioned, but that seems a bit too few for me.
The town is squashed in between impossibly high hills, as well as the sea.
This cat statue is very appropriate. I’ve never seen so many stray cats as I have in the Balkans. They’re very friendly, though, and both stray cats and dogs are looked after.
We had a few minutes up our sleeve before we left, so we walked along the harbour.
I took this shot to show you the cliffs. The town is encircled.
After a 90 minute border crossing into Croatia, we arrived at magical Dubrovnik
This was our view of the Old Town as we drove into Dubrovnik.
omg. Can’t wait till tomorrow.
Our guide recommended a restaurant by the water.
It was a glamorous way to celebrate reaching Dubrovnik.
Dad joke of the day:
What a beautiful mix on the one day. Old town and then the water views.
Wow, there is a fee to go up to the fort in Kotor now? I was there in 2008 and it was free. Very hard to get up there but beautiful views of the fjord.
Dubrovnik is beautiful, but I heard it’s now overcrowded with cruise ship tourists (also due to Game of Thrones). You need to go there in winter to view it with less people…
We booked just before high season. Dubrovnik had quite a few people, but I think there was only 1 cruise ship that day. It would be standing room only if there were a few more…