Lush Scenery, Chic Cafes Make This Balkan Destination An Eerie

The Washington Post

PODGORICA, Yugoslavia -- If it were not for the occasional antipersonnel bombs exploding in a farmer's front yard, or the cautions about speaking English in public, or the official prohibitions against "the utilization of photographic equipments," this corner of Yugoslavia would make a lovely Balkan holiday.

While the idea of "Serbian sun-seekers" might seem oxymoronic these days, the place is ravishing, which makes the war here seem all the more weird. This is the Europe that so many visitors seek in corners of France or Italy but fail to find, the folkloric and romantic Europe. Except this part of Europe is currently acting like a crazy person with his hair on fire, muttering about Adolf Hilter and Bill Clinton. Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti? They all had their charms, as war zones go, but the tiny Republic of Montenegro, Serbia's abused sibling rival, whose westward-leaning government is trying mightily to keep both Slobodan Milosevic and the NATO warplanes at bay, is a pearl. No kidding. Friends and family ask, during calls home over the sat-phone to the States, if a visitor is drinking water out of puddles and foraging for roots to boil. No. That is Kosovo. There are the occasional rumors that the waiters are spitting in the soup. But at the chic cafes that stay open illegally after curfew, they serve a very nice grilled calamari with garlic, with a salad of cucumbers so sweet they might be pears. And the inhabitants? Many of them, despite needing a bit of dental work, are gorgeous. The men in Montenegro are some of the tallest in the world. The national volleyball team, while currently on a long hiatus, is one of the best in Europe. And the women in the capital dress in black leather, with sassy short skirts and dark, dark movie- star sunglasses. "We all pretend to be Italians" is how one young computer technician put it. And they stroll the parks, past the sandbags and soldiers, arm in arm across green grasses alive with wildflowers. Because it is spring and because that is what young people do, war or no. Technically, if one did not dawdle too long with the Yugoslav army at the numerous checkpoints, a tourist could in a single day see the whole republic, from seaside to snowfields, and end it standing in the empty beer garden of the Crna Gora Hotel here in the capital, sipping a glass of dry Montenegrin white wine, watching the fireworks -- the antiaircraft batteries lighting up the night sky way off in the hills of the blockaded port city of Bar -- and listening to the tooth-rattling concussions, rolling across the land like spring thunder, of thousand-pounders dropped by NATO on the military and civilian airports. Of course, it is better for an American to watch the show from one's own balcony, because if you stand on the street your new Montenegrin friends will ask awkward questions, such as, "Why are you bombing us?" A perfect day could begin with a swim in the cool, clear waters on the clean sand beaches of the Adriatic Sea near the isle of Sveti Stefan, a quaint fishing village converted to a luxury resort for the jet set. Alas, Sylvester Stallone and Claudia Schiffer are staying away this season, though they have often been guests at Sveti Stefan and vacancies are now the norm. Bring plenty of deutsche marks, as American Express is no longer accepted, the economy is in free fall and the ATMs are on the fritz. At the ocean, the children's water slide has been ringed with barbed wire, but the sea itself, at the so-called "mosaic beach" at Becici, acknowledged as the most beautiful in Europe back in 1905, beckons. Before the wars began, the seaside here was choked with tour buses filled with holiday travelers. But all is quiet now, like a beach town after the season has ended. After a swim, there would be time for a quick cappuccino in the walled medieval city of Kotor, which lies cradled beneath the cliffs of the longest, deepest fjord in southernEurope. It is a good time to see Kotor, while it is still standing. Kotor has been designated a world heritage site by UNESCO and rivals the medieval city at nearby Dubrovnik in Croatia, which was laid siege to by the Yugoslav army -- by Serbs and, sadly, by the Montenegrins -- and was heavily shelled in 1991 and '92. Today the Yugoslav navy has inexplicably berthed its largest warship, a light destroyer, at the gates of Kotor. This so upset the residents that they begged the ship's captain to turn off his radar and keep his guns still. But it is a fluid situation, and the destroyer is a tempting target. We had a quick coffee with Ranko Krivokapic, a young (very tall) member of the Social Democratic Party and the Montenegrin parliament, who opposes Milosevic and the war. He talked politics because that is what we asked about, but he also told us that a few days before the war against Croatia began, he deserted the army. It was madness, he said, like this war. His mother saw things differently. I would rather you had died in battle, she said, than desert the army. Krivokapic shrugged. Across the square, a pretty young woman signaled that she wanted to join us, but Krivokapic smiled sheepishly and waved her away, pointing to my notebook and making a pantomime of a man playing a violin. The message was clear: I am playing my song for these foreigners. Leaving Kotor, there's time for a bit of bird-watching along the marshlands of the ecological preserve of Lake Skadar. There are white pelicans and gray herons and, according to the literature, wolves. Indeed, the Republic of Montenegro is unique, having pronounced itself "an ecological state." The parliament declared: "Man and creation in him and around him are one in their depths, their meaning and denotation. Thus the abuse of man has always entailed the abuse of nature. And being committed to the struggle of man, we are also called upon to struggle for the dignity of nature." The declaration was signed on Sept. 20, 1991, as the Yugoslav army, the Serbs and, alas, the tall Montenegrins were shelling Dubrovnik. From Lake Skadar, a detour brings one to the ancient city of Cetinje, with its monasteries and mansions, the old capital of Montenegro before it moved to Titograd, later renamed Podgorica. In Cetinje, near the center of town, there is a small church surrounded by a strange fence of rusting metal. Each post is made from one of the rifles taken from the 6,000 Turks defeated by the Montenegrins in the Battle of Vucji Do, the nearby Valley of the Wolves, in 1876. Secular death and destruction ringing a sacred space. One site that strikes newcomers to the Balkans are all the flowers brought to the cemeteries each Sunday. Piles and piles of them on every other tomb. I asked the deputy mayor of Podgorica about that one evening in the cafes. He called it the cult of death. That's nice, I said. Do you believe in Heaven? The deputy mayor thought this very amusing and naive. "No," he explained. "We are all atheists." Heading north, the visitor experiences a spectacular drive through the dizzyingly deep Moraca canyon, which rivals our own Grand Canyon and boasts miles and miles of Class 3 rapids. It would be a paddler's paradise. Beyond the Moraca canyon, in the north of Montenegro, I hear it is still possible to spend the afternoon on the ski slopes of Zabljak under Mount Durmitor, not far from the refugee camps at Rozaje, where tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo have set up housekeeping in abandoned factories. I never made it there. When I was leaving Montenegro, a writer from the New Yorker and I, traveling in his rental car with Croatian license plates, were stopped at a checkpoint by the Yugoslav army. A couple of beefy soldiers got into the car. We were driven behind a garage and then to the barracks. We were ordered to sit and not speak, our car was thoroughly searched, and we were interrogated separately. It was not pleasant, but it was not the worst thing in the world. The soldiers said they looked forward to a ground war so they could kill NATO soldiers. In my stuffy little interrogation room, they read aloud my stories stored in the IBM ThinkPad's hard drive. They were good with computers. As they read the articles, I sat silent but winced. They found the prose hackneyed and lopsided. They called me a propagandist and wondered aloud if I was a NATO spy, but nobody really believed that. As the commander and his translator flipped through my notes, and there were a lot of notes to go through that long afternoon, they came across the words "Vucji Do" and asked, what the hell is this? And I began to tell them, you know, this is the battle at the Valley of the Wolves, when the Montenegrins defeated the Turks in a decisive action, and how the rifles of the Ottomans now ringed the church in Cetinje. They smiled. The commander, an intelligent and weary man, said in perfect English, his first use of the language, "That is the correct answer." They let us go after about five hours. When we were leaving, they shook our hands, no hard feelings, and said they hoped we would come back to Montenegro in better, happier times. I agreed and asked the commander, my interrogator, for his name. He said, "I think that is for better, happier times." He told us to have a safe journey home.

Copyright 1999
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